In Genesis 1, God speaks the world into being. It’s not surprising, then, that language is tied to how we see God at work in our lives, that our faith is as much about the architecture of nouns and verbs as it is about prayer and worship and community. Yet I’d rarely given thought to the grammar of our faith, to how bound up language is in our ability to have hope during what feel like hopeless times, until recently. That is, until I had a spiritual crisis, brought on by a verb tense.
I was writing about Christmas in Bethlehem, where I live with my family. I was describing our small Christian community, reeling after years of war. I ended with what I thought was a hopeful note: Christmas would still come, even if the war returned. “Bethlehem is the city where Jesus was born,” I noted.
I asked my husband, who is both a priest and my most sensitive reader, if he would look at the text. When he reached the end, he asked: Had I considered writing the last sentence in the present tense?
