stranger in a strange language

"woe is me! for i am undone;" not only "because i am a man of unclean lips; and i dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips . . .," (isaiah 6:5)but because i am a man of often mis-understood lips in a land of misunderstanding.

i bring this up because some of those of us who gather nearly daily to pray the psalms have discovered what seems to us a wonderful translation of the psalms, the psalter according to the seventy, which others of us who gather nearly daily to pray the psalms find just a wee bitte too olde englishe to be understanded.

this microcosmic problem seems to be a reflection of part of what is going on in most of the north american and european church today. my initial reaction was not quite as crass as "get over it," but it was more just "get used to it"--not terribly pastoral. and i justify this attitude by my feeling that a lot of what passes for trying to accomodate to what we so glibly describe as "post-modern" or something is really our saying to people that they have just been dumbed down and we treat them like that, and not as the ikons of god we say we believe they are when we're speaking our sunday best. (my own ikon here is my wonderfully orthodox maternal grandmother, a wesleyan orthodox christian with an eighth-grade education and a very subtle understanding of the word of god as written in the authorized (kjv) translation.

so. given that there is a gap between easy public grasp of some of our words of art, how do we bridge that. it seems to me that in many ways those of us who grew up among the ruins of christiandom (i'm a baby boomer, remember) are the real ones at a disadvantage because it was assumed we understood all the words of the church, and we were a bit embarassed to ask. younger folks don't have to be embarassed.

but we do desperately need to be in conversatio.