Growing tensions around bilingual and multicultural liturgies

I know there are huge parishes and small communities with liturgies combining languages, and it works for them. They may be Spanish/English, Mandarin/English, or English, Vietnamese and Tagalog (to name one from my past, not done every Sunday but on occasions where the different masses of a parish were combined on festive occasions). Bilingual liturgies or trilingual liturgies may endure because there are not enough priests, not enough hours in the day, or out of strongly held convictions that the body of Christ is multicultural and multilingual and liturgies should reflect and embrace that.

I had the gift of teaching with Dr. Timothy Matovina for a few years at Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles) and learned much about the move from a national church pattern, in which the social and popular religiosity of an immigrant culture was allowed to flourish and shape the culture of the parish, to the huge multicultural realities found in many parishes today. Matovina mentions that many parishes are still (decades later) having a difficult time moving from the mindset of offering “hospitality” to the perceived outsider (the nondominant culture) instead of embracing the parish as a place of “homecoming” for those who have always belonged (“Caught Between Two Worlds”, in Expert Witness). These social (more than spiritual) realities are very much alive and well today, with a couple side effects that have recently caught me off-guard. And while the ‘culture’ of the Episcopal Church is not the same as the Roman Catholic Church in the US (particularly in scale and multicultural make-up) there are similarities.

The first pattern is the growing reluctance to have bilingual liturgies. Is it because it’s hard work to pay attention, or to understand what is going on, or that someone is in ‘my pew’? Or is it because of the cultural challenges, which are particularly manifest in music, movement, popular religiosity, and the need to be attentive to responses and engagement (rather than the built-in quality of so much ’automatic’ ritual involvement)? Especially in Anglican circles, the reality of shrinking parishes, along with a scarcity of priests in some geographical regions has made the monolingual, monocultural (an artificial reality in any community!) construct a perceived necessity for gathering more people into the worshiping community. The second similarity, from an outsider’s perspective, is that this desire to return to monolingual liturgies seems counter-intuitive; would it not make more sense to gather together, from our different language and cultural celebrations, to form a larger and richer community? I suspect that those gifted in crafting multilingual and multicultural liturgies (in other words, not simply repeating everything twice!) know things that work better to both ease people into the liturgical patterns as well as find ways to create a feeling of “homecoming” for all, and that expertise needs to be expanded and shared a bit more in many places!

But there is also the unequal balancing act of an expectation from many in the gathered community that being “comfortable” is far more important than being expansive in unity. Somewhere along the line challenge and transformation and spiritual growth took a backseat to comfort. There is a great line in one of the eucharistic prayers (a prayer that is rarely used because of other awkward elements) that I wish could be added in similar words to so many of our prayers: “Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” (BCP 1979, EP C)

Lastly, I wonder how political changes in the US will shift some of our thinking on these issues? Displacement may be increasingly a spirituality of many Christians, the comfort of familiar places and practices giving way to a raw sense of urgency. There was already a chilling conversation at the parish I was at yesterday regarding the question of whether the community should take down the large banner outside which announces “la misa en español”. Might that banner become a source of fear for many in the near future who find it both hospitable and an invitation to homecoming today?