by Karen Turner.
She walked away from faith in her teenage years, a doctoral student told me recently, but she still remembers a Methodist junior church leader who, at Easter each year, gave her a Mars bar saying that the letters stood for ‘Meet A Risen Saviour’. This wasn’t a quaint memory but carried real meaning for her.
When my own children were of an age to be running around wildly after church services, I felt that the generous supply of biscuits at coffee time said something significant to them about their place in the community. I didn’t mind that it might ruin their lunch. What mattered was the encounter.
In both cases, it wasn’t the treat itself, but the interaction that it signified; one that I am increasingly thinking of as ‘translation’. How can we speak to one another about things that are holy when there is such a large gulf between us? With differing ages, experiences, identities; ministry involves translation even if we are seemingly speaking the same language.
If you haven’t yet read R F Kuang’s novel, Babel, there are many reasons to pick up a copy. Kuang creates a world where all sorts of things are powered by a ‘magic’ that comes from translation. In this fantasy world (which isn’t too different from our own) there is almost a magnetic power that comes from matching pairs of words from different languages with similar, though not exactly the same, meanings. The gap between them, or the slight contradiction, is where the magic happens. Without this, the world literally collapses.
The book has made me imagine the unheard hum of energy in every human interaction as well as the mystical daily encounters that I have with people as a chaplain. Those who listen well are involved in the act of translation; so are those who are able to speak in ways that can be understood. What if ministering was imagined as translating, and actually, just being a willing participant was the most important part?
Towards the end of Babel, the main character, Robin, remembers his friend saying:
“That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”[1]
Someone I know who has worked in the publishing world says that the best literary translators talk about almost ‘inhabiting’ the writer that they are translating. Translating is both science and art and maybe magic, too (and currently not done very well by AI).
In Acts 2.14-21 when Peter willingly ‘steps up to the mic’ to explain the noisy co-speaking and how it is that this mystical translation seems to be unconsciously happening, his quotation of Joel contains some contradictions. This manifestation of the Spirit is completely inclusive, all genders, all ages, all positions in society. All people. Yet it is also particular. Only those who call upon the name of the Lord will experience God’s rescuing action. Both inclusive and particular. Holding these statements together is where the power is in all the noise.
Most days I use Northumbria Community morning prayer and the haunting challenges of the canticle stay with me, perhaps because this ‘translation’ of discipleship is so curiously contradictory: ‘This day be within and without me, lowly and meek and yet all-powerful’.[2] I often feel that if I could just genuinely inhabit that prayer my work for the day would be done.
Representing one institution to another is not ‘translation’ because human beings are required for the love that holds near-meaning together. No manner of programming, or on-point messaging can hold this tension together. Only people can. Only we can, and frankly this is a bit beyond what an institution can control. It pushes us into the realm of the Spirit.
When we look back at our lives, many of us might name moments when a person ‘translated’ God’s love to us. These things are really hard to describe because they likely come from the provocative encounters, interruptions, and unhurried spiritual conversation that are part of shared life in a community (and, ideally, university chaplaincies).[3] They come from difference held together by love.
[1] R. F. Kuang, Babel or The Necessity of Violence, London: HarperCollins, 2022. p. 537.
[2] The Northumbria Community Trust, Celtic Morning Prayer, London: HarperCollins, 2015, p. 18.
[3] Lucy Peacock, Mathew Guest, Kristin Aune, Alyssa N. Rockenbach, B Ashley Staples and Matthew J. Mayhew (2023) Building Student Relationships Across Religion and Worldview Difference, Coventry University, Durham University, North Carolina State University and The Ohio State University.
Theology Everywhere 
I love the Mars Bar idea; I bet she thinks of that every time she eats one!
I can name two moments that stand out for me, when the love of God was clarified by the simplest of words. As a born again Christian I was struggling with a lot of the theology, and all the contradictions I found in the Bible. It was a Methodist minister who sat down beside me and said ‘Don’t worry about all that; it’s what’s in your heart that counts.’
And then I confided in a mentor that I was finding the Christian life rather like a game of snakes and ladders. On the days when I was being cheerful and kind I was on a ladder climbing up to Heaven, but on those days when I was being grumpy and selfish, it felt like I was on a snake sliding down a slippery slope to hell. His response was ‘Never forget, Jesus is with you on the snakes as well as the ladders, and he will never let you fall off the board.’ How simple. How wise.
I will be eternally thankful to both of them.
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