Have you ever been in line at the grocery store and the family behind you can’t speak English? Maybe there’s a Honduran family who has only been in the States a few months gathering pine straw in the Florida heat behind your house. Or perhaps your local sushi server is a Burmese refugee, and can only smile and nod as you point out the fish that you’d like this time. It could be that a Palestinian family shows up at your church, thankful to just be alive and able to worship God free of persecution.
In a world splintered by war and poverty, thousands of immigrant workers and families have fled to the U.S. to make a better life for themselves. Regardless of our politics, as Christians we are faced with a serious question: how do we respond to the foreigner in our midst? We are in a spiritual crisis in the U.S. when Christians pass by the immigrant in need because it’s inconvenient and we’d rather not get our hands dirty. Against a backdrop of cartel violence and ICE conflicts, as Christians we are called to love the immigrants that God has placed on our street.
To learn a foreign language, and to make consistent efforts to communicate with those who speak that language natively, cultivates godly maturity.
Two different sets of experiences—fictional and real—drive this point home for me.
George MacDonald in The Lost Princess brilliantly illustrates how respectable people have cankers on their souls that desperately need to be removed. These decent people include the Christian, liberal or conservative, who spouts platitudes about justice and compassion, but avoids helping his next-door neighbor. MacDonald’s fairytale tells the story of two girls, Agnes the shepherdess and Rosamond the princess, who find redemption by embarking on the difficult journey inward to discover lasting freedom from sin.
Agnes was a mild-mannered girl and the pride and joy of her parents, yet when she was placed in the Wise Woman’s magical sphere, she realized that she had a shadow self that was slowly destroying her through conceit. Anges’ doppelganger was a “little girl—heedless, ugly, miserable—staring at her own toes.” She had “such an odious, self-satisfied expression that Agnes felt ashamed of seeing her. Then the little girl began to pat her own cheeks, to stroke her own body, and to examine her finger-ends, nodding her head with satisfaction. Agnes felt that there could not be such another hateful, ape-like creature, and at the same time she was perfectly aware that she was only doing outside of her what she herself had been doing as long as she could remember, inside of her . . . . She [Agnes] was despicable in her own eyes and astonished that she had never before seen the truth concerning herself.”
We all, like Agnes, have a shadow in our souls that will make us into selfish little beasts, and for some of us rubbing shoulders with people different from us, especially those who don’t speak our native language, unveils our forgotten doppelganger. The vainglorious self that thinks its little world is the best. The spirit that demands the world always cater to its hunger. The spoiled child that begs to be praised, and believes that to be inconvenienced is a crime.
As Christians moving toward theosis, climbing the ladder of divine ascent, we know that all circumstances in our lives are meant to refine us like precious stones, including and especially the circumstances that inconvenience and irritate us. In this light, I suggest that to learn a foreign language, and to make consistent efforts to communicate with those who speak that language natively, cultivates godly maturity: humility, grace, and wonder which, like a well-cut diamond, are the facets of the greatest of all the virtues—love.
I learned something about my own shadow when, two years ago, I decided I needed an adventure. Not a vacation or simply another job near my family’s country home, but a radical break from my routine, a path that led to the unknown. Why I needed this is hard to say other than that I had a deep curiosity about speaking another language and befriending its speakers. So, I moved to Murcia, Spain, alone to teach English in a rural public school where the bleating of sheep could be heard from the classroom window.
My old apartment was right under the cathedral tower where I learned to live by the hourly ring of the church bells. Every week I’d walk across the stone plaza under the white face of the cathedral to catch my ride to work, the loving gaze of La Virgen María, bebe Jesús, and Los Santos resting upon me from their royal heights. However, despite the beauty of Spain and my pursuit of wonder through a foreign language and culture, learning to live alone in Murcia was far from easy.
I think some of us have a fantasy about living abroad in Europe. We see airbrushed couples on Instagram sipping pinot noir on the Danube overlooking an ivy clad castle, and we think that’s European life for the American—when nothing could be further from the truth. To become part of another culture is hard; to learn their language requires humility. If you are a perfectionist, you will not learn very well because you have to make mistakes to improve; there is no other way. I remember swallowing my pride every day to communicate in broken Spanish with my colleagues, roommates, and the clerk at the mercado.
To make friends you must be vulnerable. You can’t hide and pretend you’re not a foreigner struggling with their language, in need of friends who can help you at the bank or to the doctor. I felt like the Guatemalan migrant worker in Florida, worried about being judged for her lack of English, and the Burmese sushi server in small-town America afraid that he might not be able to find a friend. In short, I had to become like a little child again, eager to learn what the grownups speak, happy to accept help free of charge, patiently waiting, trusting in the good will of my Murcian neighbor.
To draw on another story I love, I felt like St. George in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, who discovered that the gateway to The House of Holiness was through the Porter Humility. That’s where St. George could be healed of his body and soul wounds. I discovered as a pilgrim in Spain that the gateway to friendship is the same door. I learned that I was not as independent as I thought I was. Alone I’m helpless, but in community I’m strong, able to love like I was created to do. Funny how stripping yourself of the comfort of your own language teaches you the sacredness of words, simple conversations, and friendship despite cultural barriers.
In the spring of 2025 I fell ill in Murcia. I was not gravely ill, but sick enough to have to isolate myself in my apartment for a week. Cloistered with the flu thousands of miles away from family, my imagination conspired against me. Anxiety clawed my heart, and by the fifth day a profound loneliness had settled upon me.
Funny how stripping yourself of the comfort of your own language teaches you the sacredness of words, simple conversations, and friendship despite cultural barriers.
The Desert Fathers complained of the demon at midday, called acedia, that would haunt their ascetic worship in the mountains of Syria, a malaise that sought to sweep them away with black thoughts. If it was the same demon that visited me in Murcia, I can testify that it hasn’t lost its skill over the last thousand years! All Christians have met or will meet this fiend. John Bunyan called him Giant Despair who kept a dungeon, and Edmund Spenser described him as a fine-tongued wight who nearly toppled St. George with his guile. What I needed in the trenches of my lonely imagination was a mission to take me out of myself and onto the path of another in need of love. I remember pleading with God the fifth evening of my sickness: “Please God, just give me a job. Bring me someone to help.”
It wasn’t thirty minutes after my prayer that I heard a knock at my door. It was a tiny old woman, mumbling something to me in Spanish. I took a breath, hoping that I could communicate with her. What transpired was something that I will never forget. The poor ancient lady lived alone with a nurse, who happened to be away for the day. Her sheets had fallen from her clothesline three stories up and she thought that perhaps I had them. Realizing that I did not, the old lady allowed me to gently guide her up the elevator to her flat, which she happily invited me to enter. She showed me her dear “tendedero,”1 and her “plantas dulces,”2 and she told me about her queridos—her hijos and nietos3. I gazed at her little sala4 with the brown rug and smiled. I told her that it was all so lovely, and she told me she was very tired and old, but she had faith in God.
I left Encarna’s apartment a step closer to heaven. The fiend had disappeared ¡Dios te bendiga!5 I said to her; the blessing was mutual. I never saw Encarna again. A few months ago a friend told me she had passed away. I didn’t understand Encarna’s Spanish perfectly, but God enabled me to understand what was most important, that the love of God and neighbor transcends language.
Because I had learned to give myself grace as I adapted to the Spanish language, to still accept myself despite my failures, I could give grace freely to Encarna. In the The Lost Princess, Agnes and Rosamond’s redemptions do not happen in one magnificent moment. Instead the girls must journey and work arduously for it. St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:1-2 that salvation is a process: “Moreover, brethren, I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.” In a golden moment of recognition, Princess Rosamond asks the Wise Woman how she could “love such an ugly, ill-tempered, rude, hateful little wretch” as her, to which the Wise Woman responds “I saw, through it all, what you were going to be . . . But remember you have yet only begun to be what I saw.” The grace of the Wise Woman enabled Rosamond to cultivate a life of repentance and thus see the beautiful girl she could become through patience. The Wise Woman tested Rosamond’s character again and again, and forgave Rosamond each time she came to her with a penitent heart.
I would like to say that after my visitation with Encarna that I had once and for all conquered my shadow. However, I’m not better than little Agnes and Rosamond; I still need the Wise Woman to scoop me up and carry me away through the forest to “the bare moor . . . like the shaven crown of a monk,” for yet another lesson in her cottage. She’s still using Spanish to untangle me from my shadow. I still have much to learn about this beautiful language, and many people to bless through it for love’s sake.
When you learn another language you are given not just new words but also a new way of life. Now that I am back in the U.S., I have unique expressions, words, and cultural knowledge that I didn’t have before that I can use to love foreigners more completely. If more American Christians took time to learn another language and make meaningful connections with immigrants, I know that they would experience the grandeur of God a bit more clearly, taste his goodness, hear his love calling in tones sublime, smell, yes, even his incense in small acts of kindness that they have been done for the least of these, for where there is love and language, you will find the the body of Christ.
- Clothesline in Spanish ↩︎
- Sweet plants ↩︎
- Her dear children and grandchildren ↩︎
- Living room ↩︎
- God bless you ↩︎