Although French is officially my first language it’s fair to say that with a father who couldn’t speak English and a mother who couldn’t speak French, I grew up functionally bilingual. While many have expressed envy that I had that gift of bilingualism early in my childhood, it’s also true that I developed unexpected challenges, especially in a city like Montreal where everyone had a smattering of both languages even if they were unilingual. As such, I learned to my surprise on high school tests that there were words I had never learned in English, but was always able to use them in French without any issues. 

Having been forced to go to English school by a father who wanted me to learn the language well, I found myself in the absurd situation of being the only native French speaker in the compulsory French class and failing miserably because my teacher was a native Parisian who considered my accent barbaric. He would literally stand behind my chair in class and strike the back of my head as I pronounced the words, repeating, with each blow, ‘Stop. Speaking. Like. A. Savage.’ Needless to say, he did not get a ‘Favourite Teacher’ card at the end of the year.

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What this experience did do, however, was compel me to study whatever text I had on hand to learn new words, believing, naively as it turned out, that this would inure me against the prejudices and injuries of other people’s opinions. Instead, casually dishing out obscure or rarely-used multi-syllabic words out of context produced the opposite effect. 

“Your feedback excoriating my performance is injurious,” I announced to my unsympathetic gymnastics coach.

“Do another 50 push-ups,” he helpfully replied.

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Despite this, I relished the one and only gift that my father personally chose for me, a copy of the Reader’s Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary, which contained a thesaurus, a science word guide, a medical dictionary, multiple language translation guides and so much more. And one of the places that I used it most was interpreting religious words and phrases, often casually offered at Mass but not always contextualized. 

“Christ was scoured at the pillar,’ I heard one week at a rosary recitation, and I ran home as soon as I could to comprehend the sorrow. “Scoured. Scourged. Flagellated.”

The words reeked of pain and injustice.

The day before I’d similarly investigated “transfiguration,” which shone and danced with complex beauty. It led me to “transubstantiation,” and then to a fascination with other magical words that I encountered nowhere else — “chasuble” and “monstrance,” which were easy enough — but also concepts that no amount of dictionary time made clear to my 13-year-old brain. It’s fair to say that “hypostatic union,” “ostensorium,” and “concupiscence” evaded my “hermeneutical interpretation,” for years to come, though thankfully they didn’t come up often in the playground. “Magisterium” and “Apostolic succession” were approachable, but “homoousios” was tough to fathom and impossible to spell.

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If all this wasn’t complex enough, I had two parishes that I was obliged to frequent because both sets of priests lived nearby: the English parish connected to my school, and the French parish whose church was literally next door to my home. If you think “Apostolic succession” is tough for a kid, “succession apostolique” was doubly tricky. “Transubstantiation” became “transubstantiation” in French which was doable, but “union hypostatique” took some effort. When I complained to my dad, he said most of these words were probably Latin to begin with so perhaps I should learn that language as well. Needless to say, I stopped complaining. 

What all this did do, ironically, was compel me to read the text more closely. Where I might have brushed over certain sections of the Bible (and let’s be honest, the ‘begats’ are challenging), returning over and over to a passage or a quote created an unusual engagement that I would not otherwise have had, especially as a teenager. Over time, what this also did was alert me to another set of definitions that have helped to frame and structure my own engagement with the world. Looking back, most of the words I learned from my faith life were these: justice, love, care, compassion, humility — as easy to understand in English as in any other tongue. N’est-ce pas?