Pentecost isn't just about red, of course. It's about the creation of the Church by the descent of the Holy Spirit, the comforter and inspirer that Jesus promised he would send after his Ascension (another holiday I love, though partly because it always falls close to and sometimes on my birthday). I like to think that red was a part of the tongues of fire alighting on the heads of all those people in Jerusalem. The real theme for Pentecost, though, is language and spirit. These ideas all weave together into a complex pattern. Jesus Christ was the Word at the beginning of creation who brought the world into being, spoken by the Father with the breath of the Spirit. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit. Now his Gospel is preached throughout the world by words, by the witness of the words of the Scripture, spoken and heard and taught and read in the Church, established by the Spirit, who enabled the apostles to speak saving words in foreign languages. Postmodern types like to say that words form reality, because they think it dismisses any notion of objective truth. I think they're close but not quite: the Word forms reality, and that's why there is such a thing as truth.

The best way to learn for yourself how much words determine reality is to learn a foreign language. Better yet, move to a place where a foreign language is the language and your own language isn't. Then the unfamiliar strings of letters aren't confined to a vocabulary test in class, but personally inhibit your ability to shop, order dinner in a restaurant, and find the bathroom. Then the grammar isn't an irritating homework assignment, but the bare minimum to communicate relationships of time, space and possession. Once immersed in a foreign language, you find yourself thinking about the declensions of nouns in your spare time and struggling to find the words in your own language that have been displaced by all the new ones. In a way, learning a new language inducts you into a new way of thinking. Leave your language family – for us Americans, that would be the branch that includes primarily German and Dutch, and secondarily French, Spanish and Italian – and you find your mind twisted in ways you never thought were possible.

When my family first moved to Svaty Jur (St. George), Slovakia, a cute little village right outside the capital, in a beautiful August some years ago, the sky was glistening blue and the very air felt heavy with the scent of roses, but I was terrified. I, Sarah, who had all of my remembered life been in full command of the English language, whose ability to twist and manipulate words was nearly synonymous with my personality, was suddenly thrown into a world where English witticisms were irrelevant and clever remarks ignored. It was no consolation at all that the new language I was encountering was pretty unimportant in the grand planetary scheme of things; that Slovak is only spoken by about 6 million people the world over; that mastering it wouldn't bring me in touch with hundreds of great and legendary works of famous literature. All that really mattered was that these people spoke this language well, and I sure didn't, and as long as I didn't, I was the one on the outside – American citizenship notwithstanding.

It didn't help much, either, that the Slovaks are positively cultic about their language: the language of angels, they say, more beautiful than all others on the earth. It's very much bound up with their religious history, too. Sts. Cyril and Methodius brought Christianity to Slovakia in the ninth century, along with an alphabet called Glagolithic, precursor to Cyrillic, that provided the basis for Old Church Slavonic, the ecclesial language of the eastern world that introduced the pagan Slavs to Christian civilization. Cyril and Methodius's toughest battle as missionaries was winning permission to translate the liturgy into the vernacular, instead of imposing meaningless Greek on the new converts. Another revered national hero in Slovakia was a man by the name of Ludovit Stur, who codified the standard grammar and dialect of Slovak in the 19th century, which once and for all established Slovakia as an ethnic and cultural identity unto itself, despite the fact that it had always been under the control of foreign powers. Now the country has a Matica Slovenska or Matrix of Slovakia language institute in the center of the country for the preservation of the authentic language and heritage against lingual imperialists. They're pretty defensive about it. Once I was even chided by a relative who lives near the Matica Slovenska for acquiring such a grotesque Svaty Jur accent. (The Matica Slovenska and Svaty Jur are only about a hundred miles apart.)

It doesn't take much time in an immersion situation to learn to speak a language conversationally. The vibrant youth group I attended provided me with just the social milieu I needed to get pretty good at what I liked to call "gutter Slovak." (It wasn't really.) But in the same vicinity I suffered the most from my language incapacities – and that was in church. Worship services were brutal torture for the non-comprehending. It wasn't the hard, narrow wooden benches that bothered me, or the typical Baroque decoration around me that nowadays would be called overkill. It was the fact that worship is about the Word – hearing it, speaking it, learning it – and I didn't understand the words that were communicating the Word. I was able to sing the liturgy after awhile but it didn't mean a thing to me. The sermons were long and probably very good (I knew the pastor well because he had learned English and spoke to me that way), but they only directed my attention more pointedly to the hard wooden benches. Slovaks are also very fond of slow minor key melodies, and they're only now updating their hymnbooks (the older versions of which average 14 verses per song), so the music didn't liven things up much either. Still, I wouldn't have minded any of that if I could have at least understood the language. The problem was that as long as I couldn't follow the logic of a Slavic sentence, my worship wasn't only boring, it felt pointless. It made for a pretty empty experience all around.

Then, during Advent, the time of anticipation of better things to come, the linguistic tide began to turn in my favor. All of a sudden, one morning in church, I spotted a word I knew from my vocabulary lists. It was viera. Viera means faith. It struck me, quite unexpectedly, that viera is a beautiful word. Faith is a beautiful thing too ... maybe there was a connection. It might have been just my overwrought and spiritually starved imagination, but it seemed to me that Slovak was strikingly onomatopoeic, even in its abstract church words. Another time I weeded out the word hriech from a sermon. What an ugly word it is! It has a difficult to pronounce consonant cluster at the beginning, and it ends with the dreadful coughing noise denoted by ch, which, incidentally, is considered a separate letter of the alphabet in Slovak, even though it's actually two letters. No wonder that hriech means sin!

This process continued – picking out and understanding the old familiar words, one at a time, at a snail's pace. At Epiphany I found radost, and what a joy it was indeed to finally be able to roll my R's. Rrrrrrrrrrrradost! I could trill as loudly and boldly as any flesh and blood Slav. (Ok, maybe not quite that well.) By Easter, I had discovered my favorite word of all, milost. Grace. Milost is related to other Slovak words, such as to love ardently (milovat) and dear (mily). It did seem to be only by the grace of a dear and loving God that I was able to assimilate to a peculiar new culture, learn a baffling Slavic language, and pay heed throughout an entire church service. At the same time, I was really claiming these words as my own. I had to struggle so hard to get them that their meanings became that much more alive to me. Bound up with my whole intense experience of being a missionary kid and devoting a year of my life to volunteer work were all these words, words that were no longer the same old slogans of the church but the building blocks of my existence, in fact: the real world.

By Pentecost it was my mom who had made the most amazing discovery about words in churchly Slovak. Slovak grammar distinguishes between the you that means a personal acquaintance, a close friend, a trusted confidante (ty), and the you that addresses a superior, elder, authority figure, an unknown, a stranger (vy). The line between the two is rigorously maintained in Slovak culture; so much so, in fact, that older Slovaks have told me that they had to address their own parents as vy instead of ty all their lives, as a sign of respect. The amazing thing is that in church, worshippers always speak to God as ty. Not the distant, indifferent, deistic sort of God, but the close, concerned, personal, involved God – the kind of God who was willing to become man in order to get more closely involved with his people. There's a world of difference between the two words ty and vy. The good news is that God is on this side of the world, with us and for us; in a word, the Word.