Human beings come into the world hard-wired to speak any human language.

Each of us, at birth, is cap-able of making any sound humans can make, and any baby can potentially under-stand any human tongue. As we grow we learn a particular language — our “mother tongue” — and our ability to learn other languages diminishes.

A “mother tongue” is the language spoken in our home, village, or nation, the one we learn naturally and without apparent effort. It forms our thought patterns. It is the language we babble before we can speak. Our mother tongue enables us to communicate, make our needs known, celebrate with others, and express our deepest thoughts and feelings. We could even say that in some ways, our mother tongue gives us birth, since we human animals are largely formed by the words we speak and the stories we tell. Jews who speak Yiddish call it their “mamaloshen”. The use of “mama” for mother suggests just how intimate the relationship between our language and our identity is.

Whenever I travel away from the American Midwest, where I was born and raised, I am aware that the way I speak English is different from how others speak it. In other English-speaking countries, I am marked by my variety of English as someone from elsewhere, a foreigner. When I travel in France, Japan, or other non-English speaking countries, I struggle to make myself understood because I am fluent only in my first language. After weeks away from home, it is always something of a relief to hear “my” language once again, to speak without sounding like a stranger. I know I am home.

I believe that just as humans are hardwired for language, we are hardwired for religion. That is, there is something deep in our make-up that seeks a higher purpose, a sense of meaning, an ongoing experience of something more beneath the surface of daily life. The religions of the world originate in their desire to articulate this deeper purpose. Most are simply given their religion. They learn it in the same way they learn their first language. Thus the religions we are raised in form a kind of “mother tongue." As we grow up, we learn our religion’s vocabulary, stories, and “accent.” It all happens very naturally. We eventually come to know ourselves in the particular prayers, rituals, and stories of our own religion.

There is something deep in our make-up that seeks a higher purpose, a sense of meaning, an ongoing experience of something more beneath the surface of daily life.

Most of us can get by with one language as long as we speak with those who use the same language because human language is open-ended and expandable. Problems arise when we travel or when someone who does not speak our language comes into our world. Even then, we generally do not hate people who speak another language; we try to communicate with them. We may struggle to form words and phrases in their language and they in ours, but both of us come away a bit richer for our encounter.

I wish the same thing were true of the religious languages we speak. One of the great tragedies of our times is that we have allowed our religions to divide us. Sectarian divisions pit people against one another and cause violence and bloodshed throughout the world. Rather than looking at the world’s religions as dialects of a great universal language, many see them as absolutely different. As a result, we come to look at those who practice other religions as members of a different species, somehow less human. They are “barbarian,” a Greek-derived word that originally meant people whose speech sounded (to the Greeks anyway) like meaningless syllables — ba-ba-ba.

I believe we need to become multilingual when it comes to religion. Just as I better understand my own mother tongue when I learn even a few words of another language, so too, I come away from a reading or discussion of another religion’s sacred language with a deepening of my own understanding of Christianity. Very early on (maybe when I was about 13 and first getting interested in Greek and Roman mythology), I saw similarities between the miraculous stories of classical gods and goddesses and the miracle stories I learned in Catholic school. Later in college, I was introduced to the study of comparative mythology, which examines how stories migrate and morph from one culture to another. In graduate school, in a course on historical linguistics, I learned about etymology and how new words (and thus new concepts and ideas), enter a language to help it change and grow.

The world we live in today is a polyglot (many-tongued) world. It is also a multicultural world. Each of us speaks a mother tongue. Most have a particular religion or set of beliefs which have parented us. But because of the nature of our global society, each of us will have to interact with others who do not speak our language or practice our religion. So we are presented with a choice. We can either retreat into our linguistic and religious bubbles, or we can take the risk to learn each other’s languages. Neither path is easy, but the first leads to division, the second to greater harmony.

We can either retreat into our linguistic and religious bubbles, or we can take the risk to learn each other’s languages. Neither path is easy, but the first leads to division, the second to greater harmony.

I believe the second path is joyous. For me, the variety of stories about the divine is an unending source of wonder and enlightenment. To read the ancient Norse Eddas, the Raven stories of the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, the Bhagavad Gita, or the scriptures of the Hebrews and Christians provides me different windows through which to view the enormity of what we humans call “God” or “the gods.” My notion of God changed when I learned that the word “lord,” which Christians use to refer to God, did not originally mean a high and mighty Being, but came from two Old English words hlaf + weard, which meant the one who kept the loaf (the loaf-ward) for the clan. To learn that the Latin word translated as “lord” was dominus, a word related to the Latin domus for “home” also brought my notion of God indoors, as it were, making God personal and intimate rather than mighty and intimidating. A similar thing happens when I found that the Aramaic word “abba”—which Jesus used to open the Lord’s Prayer and which is usually translated as “Father”—meant something closer to “daddy.” Knowing more about our vocabulary deepens our understanding.

As anyone who has tried to learn another language after a certain age knows, it is not easy to shape the sounds, let alone understand the language like a native speaker. We will never be as “at home” in a learned language as in one that we grow up speaking. Yet life is enriched by the study of a second, third, or fourth language. And the more bits and pieces of language you understand, the richer your own expression of thoughts and feelings will be in your first language. Like ordinary language, the religious language we learn is sufficient for understanding, but that does not mean that we can’t enrich our religious mother tongue with words, stories, and ideas from other traditions.

God is immense, and life is complex. No one religious language is great enough to capture all of God. Learn to speak your own language well but also become multilingual. The world depends on it.