One recent weekend my son spontaneously asked to use the car and we said, “Yes.” He is trustworthy and we trust him and he took the car. Later in the day my husband and I were out and we decided spontaneously to go see a movie, a rare treat for us, and we realized that if we went home first to walk our dogs we would not get to the theater in time to see the movie we wanted. So I called my son and asked him if he would walk the dogs and he said, “Yes.” But he did not do it. When we were all back home discussing the progression of events and my feelings of disappointment, my son said, “Just to keep all this in perspective, I know a kid who was caught with weed in his car.”
I thought about that conversation when I read today’s Genesis passage. I thought about how that one word “Yes,” spoken in our shared one language, came to have different meanings in our one family. I thought about how we live in the same family and share the same abode and the same belongings and yet our different ages and birth orders and personalities cause our communications to sometimes evolve to a kind of babbling. We are “lost in translation,” talking our own talk and walking our own walk, engaging in selective hearing and selective listening. It is not only language that separates us one from another, and if I blow off this reading as a long-ago tale about a people far away and different from me I would be missing the point.
May our shared communications be tempered with compassion rather than … well … temper. May love bring us to a place where we can see each other face to face, eye to eye, ear to ear, heart to heart. May it be so.
Namaste! Amen!
The Readings
Genesis 11:1-9
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ 5The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ 8So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
Psalm 33:10-15
Mark 8:34 – 9:1
The reading is from the website below.
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