L'evangile en français
Last night after my Epistles class, I walked past the WTS chapel on my way out. There was a service going on, with a small number of attendees... in French. A preacher stood in front of a microphone.
I sat in the back and listened for ten minutes. He had a lovely voice (and of course it was in French, which lends itself to sounding beautiful), and I was pleased to find that I could follow what he had to say without much effort. This despite never having learned the specific vocabulary of Christianity in French.
What intrigued me was that it gave me a special thrill to hear the Gospel preached in a language other than English. For some reason, this foreign language seemed to lend it a special credibility or legitimacy. I'm not sure why, but it's an interesting phenomenon. It may have to do with making it concrete that other people are believers too. After all, the church was born at Pentecost.
posted by Pascale Soleil @ 4:46 PM
1 Comments:
In Montreal we sometimes have parts of our service in French, and on Saturdays, and during Evensong, that's always the case. Of course I can go into any Catholic church and hear the words of the mass in French too. I like to hear this for the same reasons you wrote about here but I still miss a lot, not being nearly capable enough at oral comprehension. But there's a little shiver of happiness and peace that I feel whenever the language switches and I see people in the congregation - who haven't understood so well before - suddenly hearing their own language.
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