My Grandmother Spoke It And I Do Not

You can still say the phrase and you have no idea what it means.

It is about six syllables. You have it by sound, the way you have a tune, and you could say it right now out loud and it would come out more or less correctly, and if somebody asked you what any of the words were you would have nothing.

She said it every time you left her house. Every single time, at the door, with her hand on your arm.

And she has been gone eleven years and nobody has said it to you since, and you have never asked anybody what it means, and you could probably find out in about four minutes.

That is what this article is about, and the four minutes are not the point.

Because it is not one phrase. It is a whole language that stopped in your family, and it stopped in about one generation, and you are the far side of it.

Your grandmother had it completely. Your parent understands more than they let on, and can follow a conversation, and will not speak it. And you have six syllables and a tune.

And there is a thing you have felt about that and it comes out as a low unfocused resentment, and it is usually pointed at your parent, and it goes something like: why did you not just speak it to me.

I want to take that off the table before we go any further, and I am not going to do it gently or with a caveat.

Do not blame them.

There is almost always a hard reason a family stops speaking a language, and you will very likely never be told the whole of it, because the whole of it is not a story people tell their children.

It is nearly always about safety, or work, or a room somebody was laughed at in. Somebody arrived somewhere and learned quickly what it cost to be heard speaking it. Somebody decided their child would not have that, and made a decision that looked like the right one, and it usually was the right one at the time.

They did not withhold it from you. They protected you with it, and the protection had a price, and the price is your six syllables.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land

There is a psalm written by people who had been carried away, and its question is about language.

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land? (Psalm 137:4, King James Version)

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land.

That psalm sits by a river in a foreign country. The people are captives, and their captors have asked them for a song, and this is the answer they give.

And notice what the difficulty is. It is not that they have forgotten the songs. It is that singing them there, in that place, in front of those people, is not possible. The songs belong to a whole world, and the world is gone, and performing them for an audience that took it would be something worse than silence.

So they hang the harps up on the willows.

That is a real thing that happened to a real people, and it is worth naming plainly because it is the closest thing in scripture to what happened in your family.

A language does not usually stop because people stopped loving it. It stops because somewhere, at some point, singing it in that place was not possible, and somebody hung the harp up.

And here is the part of that psalm I want you to have.

They kept the question. The psalm exists. Somebody wrote down, in the language, that they could not sing in the strange land, and the writing of it is the thing that survived and reached you.

Nothing was as completely lost as it felt at the time.

A language usually stops because singing it somewhere was not possible, and the hanging up of the harp has never once been the same as a lack of love. Psalm 137:4 asks how the song could be sung in a strange land and keeps the question itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody who can say six syllables and does not know what they mean.

The door is not locked

Here is the practical half, and it is the belief underneath your resentment.

You have been treating this as something that was taken and cannot be got back.

That is what makes it ache in the particular way it does. Not sadness that you cannot speak it, which would be manageable, but the sense of having been deprived of something that was rightfully yours and is now out of reach forever.

The first half of that is fair. Something was not passed on, and that is a real loss and I am not going to reduce it.

The second half is not true, and it is the half doing the damage.

That language is not gone. It is spoken by millions of people. There are recordings, teachers, books, and neighborhoods where it is the ordinary sound of a street. It is one of the most available things in the world.

You are not locked out. You are simply somebody who does not speak it yet, which is the same position as anybody else learning it, with one enormous advantage: you have heard it. Your ear knows the shape of it from before you could talk, and that is worth more than a year of study and cannot be bought.

And here is the other thing worth knowing, because it is what the resentment has been hiding.

If you learn it, your parent will hear you speak it.

That is the actual possibility in front of you, and it is much larger than a grievance. Somebody in your family made a hard decision decades ago and has lived with the results of it, and the results include a child who cannot say what their mother said at a door.

You cannot un-decide that. You can walk back through it from your side.

That language is spoken by millions and is one of the most available things there is, and nobody has ever once locked a door on you. The written word keeps the question written down in the language itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been carrying a grievance that was hiding a possibility.

Learn one word and say it in the family

So here is the assignment, and it has two halves.

Learn one word your family would have used and say it to somebody in the family.

One word. Not the phrase, not yet. A word that belonged in that house: the word for the thing she cooked, the word she used for you, the word for come here, the word for the food nobody has a good translation for.

Find out what it is. Ask, or look it up, or listen to somebody say it. Learn to say it properly enough that a speaker would recognize it.

And then say it to somebody in your family.

Your parent, an aunt, a cousin who is on the same side of this as you. Say it in an ordinary moment, in the middle of a sentence, without announcing what you are doing.

And here is what to expect, because it may not be simple.

Your parent may correct your pronunciation, quite quickly, without appearing to think about it. That is not criticism. That is somebody's mouth doing something it has not done in thirty years.

They may say the word back and then say another one. They may tell you what her mother used to say. They may say nothing at all and change the subject, and that is also an answer and it is not a refusal of you.

And they may get upset, and if they do, it is not about the word.

Whatever happens, do not ask for more that day. One word, said once, into a room where it used to live. That is the whole assignment and it is bigger than it sounds.

And find out what the six syllables mean. Not today, unless you want to. But find out, because it is four minutes, and because she said it to you every time you left and you have never known what she was giving you.

You are able to put one word back into a room where it used to live, and one word said once has never once been too small to be worth doing. Psalm 137:4 keeps the question written in the language it was asked in, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody saying a word to their own parent.