They commonly use another responsive greeting in gatherings like this one. I say "God is good" and you respond "all the time" then I say "all the time" and you say "God is good". Let's try that…

God is good / All the time / So be it.

I call this talk "Translating and Transforming" because I feel I do that nearly all the time. Now I'm not a linguist - I know how to find the ladies' room in a number of languages, but my skills with the French, German and Latin I studied long ago have atrophied with lack of use except in crossword puzzles. Being basically a pragmatist, I have learned what I need to know and the rest has slipped away. It is a continuing regret as I travel widely in the world that I cannot communicate fluently in other languages. That's the more common meaning of translating - taking words from one language and putting them into another language. But that's not the translating I'm talking about this evening.

Translating has several other meanings from common terms to scientific ones.

What I'm talking about is the translating we all do from someone else's perspective or point of view into our own perspective of how the world works. Most the time in our one to one daily interactions we don't even think twice about it. In our minds, we simply say, 'oh, that's what he's talking about' or something like that. It's the paraphrasing we do in our heads when we're trying to relate to someone else or to some other concept.

I suppose it has come home to me particularly over these past three years after I moved from one English-speaking country to another. I can relate quite well to that phrase "two countries separated by a single language" - I think you Irish can also relate to that! Forgetting about accents - and that's a whole 'nother matter - there are times when I am very much aware that I am in foreign countries when I am in Ireland and the UK. With time, the translating has gotten easier and easier, but new phrases are cropping up all the time. My education will never be totally complete, I'm sure! And we must acknowledge that some things simply don't translate.

I looked up the meaning of "translating" on-line and was intrigued by the variety of usages of the term. Besides the primary definition of taking one word from one language into another, I also found that "translate" means to "put into simpler terms, to explain or interpret, to paraphrase, to express in another medium, to change from one form, function or state to another, to convert or transform."

That leads us to the other part of the title "Transforming". To me, that means being changed in some deeper, more profound way. It's a process, not necessarily a goal in itself.

The dictionary again confirms this sense. It says : to change in composition or structure, to change the outward form or appearance of , to change in character or condition. Interestingly, it gives as the only synonym the word "convert". That certainly has religious connotations. And the word "convert" applies to both definitions.

So there are two steps here: the translating or paraphrasing that we do all the time to comprehend someone else's meaning and then the transforming and changing that sometimes we do as a result of allowing those translated words to go deeper into our understandings and perceptions. Sometimes this is an internal transformation, but other times it leads to action based on that new understanding. In either case, we aren't the same ever again.

As we are a "religious" society, I turned to the Bible and the book of Genesis to learn what it had to say about languages. Not surprisingly, there are confusing accounts. In Genesis 10, it starts out talking about the spread of Noah's progeny after the Flood. From the line of Japheth, it says his grandsons became maritime people who spread out into territories by their own clans within their nations each with its own language. The same is said of Ham's sons who became the Canaanites with their languages.

Moving right along to Genesis 11, it says the whole world had one language and a common speech. I think the author is talking about the world before Noah's grandsons and their progeny scattered. That world was not in Palestine, but down the Tigris and Euphrates River valley, down from the Mount Ararat the Armenians and Turks claim today - supposedly the landing place of Noah's Ark..

Genesis 11 is the story of the Tower of Babel. Verse 1 says point blank that the world had only one language and one speech - so they probably all said "tomato" the same way! According to the Bible, the people decided to build a tower up into the heavens to connect themselves more directly with God and to keep themselves together. They didn't want to be scattered over the face of the earth.

BUT that wasn't God's plan. God apparently wanted to scatter them all over the earth. So how did he do it? He didn't sent a plague; he didn't send an earthquake. No, his plan was more subtle, peaceful, and eminently more effective: he "confused their language to they could not understand each other." Amazingly simple, wasn't it?

Genesis 11:1-9: Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

GE 11:3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth."

GE 11:5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6 The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

GE 11:8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel--because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Looking back at verse 6, "The Lord said, 'If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this [build a tower to Heaven] then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." Think about that - here is God acknowledging that if we all speak the same language, nothing is impossible!! That's still true today. Awesome! What a revelation!

But that in turn raises a big question. Now why would God not want people to accomplish the impossible?? Supposedly there were no other people on earth and he put them all there. At that point in time, he had only one covenant with the people of the earth - he gave Noah the rainbow as a symbol of his covenant not to flood the entire earth ever again. We had not yet had Abraham or Moses or David or Solomon or Jesus to deepen the covenantal relationship with God. There was missing that transformational deepening I alluded to earlier. At least, that's my guess.

So the time of the Tower of Babel was the time of scattering people all over the earth, the time of multiple languages arising. The multiple languages were there to confuse people, so they couldn't work together to do the impossible job of building a tower to heaven. One wonders what that first language was. It seems like it was a second expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Can you imagine being there in the city? We've all experienced the frustration of not being understood - and here was a whole frustrated city. It seems at that point in time, God wasn't interested in translators or translating. His purpose was to get the whole earth populated. Maybe that is where the old joke comes from: If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans! Was God laughing?

What happens when we're frustrated? Often it means the action we want, the path we intend to follow isn't available to us - the result is either that we sulk and get angry or we figure out another way and move forward. Figuring out another way is transformation. I think God was force-feeding a level of transformation on the people of Babel, making them change their ways, change their entire lives - all because of language.

One of the reasons translating is such a challenge is that language reflects different cultures, different ways of seeing things, different ways of relating to the world. There are inherent values reflected in words and phrases that are distinctive to the language and culture.

We have in our history example after example of how language has changed lives. Here we sit in a land that didn't have English as its language - it was the language of conquest. And now in your schools and institutions at least in the Republic, your indigenous language is being re-claimed along with your history.

This re-claiming is happening ironically at the same time English has become the lingua franca of the world, the language of people who want broader connections. So we have these two parallel paths in language. Each is transformative in its own right.

I see these parallel paths in so many of my own travels worldwide among Friends. In South Korea and Japan, I am grateful in this odd way to conqueror General MacArthur who insisted that directional signs include Latin script in addition to the country's language. English is one of the languages Koreans and Japanese can sometimes use to talk to each other. India has dozens of languages and English is the overall common language.

Among our African Friends, most speak at least three languages, the language of their tribe, a broader local language such as Kiswahili, and then a European language. East Africans can speak with most but not all central Africans in Kiswahili - but that doesn't work for southern Africans or west Africans. They have to resort to English or French. .Aymara is the language of the Andes Friends in Peru and Bolivia, with not all of them speaking Spanish much less English. I am in awe of our multi-lingual Friends around the world. My fancy education didn't teach me to communicate directly with all of them.

But as I mention our far-flung Friends, I acknowledge that it is my travels among them that inspired this talk. In a short amount of time, I can move from the experience of someone telling me I'm protected by the blood of the Lamb to someone telling me they're holding me in the Light - and they basically intend the same thing.

So where's the translation and where's the transformation? As a child, I was raised Presbyterian and I found Friends by attending George School, a Quaker boarding school outside Philadelphia. I graduated from there not thinking I had become a Friend until I found myself dissatisfied with higher education and looking for meaning so I found myself seeking out local Friends for worship. I had to translate "holding someone in the Light" from my Presbyterian "praying for someone". I must say Presbyterians also use "blood of the Lamb" language - so maybe I was more multi-lingual than I thought!

So here we've got three ways, three languages if you will, of conveying a loving message, a message that invokes Divine Assistance. Can we say they share the same language? Probably not. Do they share the same understanding? Probably not. Do they share the same intention? Probably yes.

In the languages I've studied - and I've briefly added Spanish, Georgian and Russian to my list of languages I could get directions in - it has been fascinating to see how language reflects or perhaps even shapes common understanding and approaches to everyday things. The formal and the intimate 'you' - the 'thee' and 'thou' English has dropped - are still important in other western languages. Sometimes pronouns are dropped altogether, as if the person or thing is less important than the verb. It's interesting that there are a few Quakers, called Conservative Friends, who try to retain the 'thee' and 'thou' of the past. 'Thou' is always reserved for God and 'thee' is for the equality of everyone else.

So we have the opportunity to translate a lot. But are we transformed? Let's revisit the 'protected by the blood of the Lamb' blessing. When a Kenyan Friend first said that to me, it left me cold as it's not a part of my usual language pattern. I find when things like that annoy me, it is an opportunity to examine what's below the surface, to examine where my growing edge lies. So I quickly considered that phrase, translated it into 'being prayed for' or 'held in the Light'. That's fine - I knew the speaker meant only the best for me. It was easy to stop there. Then I chose to look a little deeper.

Now, initially, being protected by someone's blood seems like a rather messy endeavour, not at all appealing. However, we're talking about The Lamb here, and we mean Jesus himself. And what does the reference to blood refer to? It refers to his crucifixion and death on the cross. For many Christians and Quakers, it means his death, even more than his life, is what is significant and meaningful. In his death, they believe that all who believe in Him receive everlasting life, that Jesus showed the way, prepared the path, and saved us all from eternal life in hell. Wow!

So this Kenyan Friend was blessing me both in this life and the next! He was affirming my own spiritual journey while invoking Divine protection for it. Understanding this blessing was yet another part of my own spiritual journey. It led me to look again at the meaning of Jesus' death.

Back in 1982, I moved from Philadelphia where I had been very active in my local meeting to Oregon to attend graduate school. Now Oregon is 3,000 miles west of Philadelphia and I knew only two people before I got there. Having arrived on a Saturday, I made a point of attending the only meeting for worship in the area the next day. Through that connection I found a place to stay for the first term for which I was grateful. However, on subsequent Sundays, I found no one was talking to me, I felt the need to keep introducing myself, and no connections were made. I've since discovered this happens in a number of meetings and churches. After week after week of this frustration, my attendance became irregular.

Oregon is one of those parts of the US which has two different types of Friends: liberal, unprogrammed silent Meetings for Worship and Friends Evangelical Churches. The Friends Churches outnumber the widely-scattered silent meetings.

Engrossing myself in the 3-year program of graduate study, I only attended every few months for several years, even after I had finished. I even started attending another independent church that had a dynamic woman pastor. She gave great sermons, I even took notes, and I felt a lot of growth in my spiritual awareness. I was exploring other spiritual paths as well, feeling my own consciousness of the Divine expanding. But I still kept showing up at Meeting every few months, still leaving without making connections.

In November 1988, on one of my infrequent appearances at Meeting, there was a notice of an FWCC regional gathering, bringing together both types of Friends from Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Canada. What got my attention was that the featured speaker was going to be the author Margaret Hope Bacon who was a friend of mine from my Philadelphia days. So I decided to go.

It was an interesting weekend and I had time to talk with Allen, Margaret's husband, but no time with Margaret. So she suggested I 'crash' a bring-and-share dinner her hostess was giving on Sunday evening for some group of women, but husbands were also included. So I showed up as a total stranger on this woman's doorstep and was welcomed. The group had a most interesting conversation about Quakerism and I left with a smile on my face. But I still wasn't back in the fold.

It was the practice of this other church I had been attending that its members must re-affirm their membership on the 1st of January every year. And, at coffee hour in early December, I remarked to a friend that this might be my year to declare my membership and resign my membership in Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. I should add that my old meeting was encouraging me to transfer my membership - but my reaction was, to where?.

As I entered my house coming home from church, the phone was ringing. It was the hostess from that other evening inviting me to join that group of women, who were drawn from both unprogrammed and evangelical Friends. I got the Divine message in this right away - I was supposed to stay Quaker and I was supposed to get involved again. And so I did.

But what was placed before me was not simply showing up on Sunday and having someone to talk to. That would have been easy. No, God challenged me a lot more than that. I became part of this women's group, later dubbed the Multwood Group, because its original members were all either from Multnomah Meeting or Reedwood Friends Church, just a few miles apart from each other. Over the years I actively participated we were dealing with questions like how can you call yourself Quaker? Who are the real Quakers? How do you explain your own theology?

As an unprogrammed Friend, I had never had to articulate what I believed, in fact, I wasn't sure what I believed and this presented quite a challenge. We talked about Quakerese and what the different words mean to the different 'flavours' of this religion we call Quakerism. [Yes, as any new attender will tell you, we have our own language!] I wish now I had taken notes of these discussions because all of us found them challenging and, ultimately, transforming.

Did we end up believing the same things? Heavens, no! There were times I drove home, saying I was glad I could never be an evangelical - and I'm sure the same was true of the others. We lovingly disagreed. And yet we found a unity and a union at a mystical level.

But what came out of this was transformational - both on the personal level and within the Religious Society of Friends. Like nearly everyone, I had gone happily along, focussed on my local meeting, wondering how 'they' - which included Richard Nixon of all people - could call themselves Quakers. Most of us have a real 'us and them' mentality about other Quakers. Well, I found out for starters that evangelical Friends relate more readily to the term 'Friends' rather than 'Quaker' - because that was the term George Fox used. Oh. Both are right, neither is wrong - just a different emphasis.

The transformation for me was being 'back in the fold', conscious of being on a path leading to greater understanding of my divine purpose, of being part of a much larger community. And that was just the beginning.

The resulting transformation of our dialogues, our exploration of language, includes our impact on Friends in the northwest of the US. The Multwood Group started having weekend retreats together, and after hearing about the International Women's Gathering at Woodbrooke, we initiated the Northwest Quaker Women's Theological Gathering - and they have recently held their sixth such gathering, and it has expanded to include women from other parts of the U.S. and the world.

Northwest women - both evangelical and unprogrammed -- have served nationally and internationally as heads of various Quaker organisations - many of them Multwood alumni. And both yearly meetings in the area - Northwest YM and North Pacific YM -- are active in the wider family of Friends through FWCC. There has been a real ripple effect from a small group of women wanting to understand each others' language. I wouldn't be standing here before you had it not been for that group.

Let me add here another transformation story I heard from someone here recently:

Have you heard the one about the Scottish atheist who was fishing on Loch Ness? All of a sudden, the Loch Ness Monster rose out of the water, nearly swamping his boat. Its mouth was open ready to swallow the fisherman. He cried out, "God, help me!" Everything stopped mid-air - freeze frame. A voice boomed out, "I thought you didn't believe in me." "Until a few minutes ago, I didn't believe in the Loch Ness Monster either!"

But God uses language for his purpose as well. Going back to the Bible, the other occasion that features a variety of language is the description of the Pentecost in Acts 2. Now Pentecost was the Greek name from the Jewish festival of the Weeks. The roots of that festival go back to the annual barley harvest - the first sheaves harvested were laid on the altar and 50 days later the celebration was held. It was a joyous time of pilgrimage.

So one morning, according to Acts chapter 2, Jesus' disciples are sitting around and [verse 2] "Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came down from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. [3] They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. [4] All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them."

The disciples then rushed outside and found themselves able to speak in different languages to the thousands of pilgrims gathered in Jerusalem for the Festival. Everyone was quite amazed. The apostles were so excited about being able to speak different languages that they spent the day telling the story of Jesus and the resurrection to all these pilgrims. By the end of day, they had 3,000 converts. See, there's that word 'convert' again - the synonym for 'transform'.

So God once again imposed through the Holy Spirit a variety of languages to serve his purpose - to spread the word that became Christianity. It is interesting to note that the celebration meant something different to Jews and to Christians.

We have an example of that in what we call so-called 'modern' history. Look what happened to the Church once the Bible was available to people printed in their own vernacular. Not only was the printing press revolutionary, but coupling the availability of the text with translations into local languages transformed the religious landscape of the 1500's and 1600's. That shook the very foundations of the church of its time. We certainly are the beneficiaries of that transformation.

No longer did people have to look to stained glass windows in glorious cathedrals for the stories or the versions handed down from the pulpits in Latin. Now they could hear the words and understand them and wrestle with them. They were literally transformed by these translations.

But translating and transformation rest on the foundation of two other factors: willingness and listening. Without them, we are just looking at words.

Willingness in this context is wanting to know what the words mean, wanting to know what someone is saying, wanting to know what someone else believes, wanting to be transformed in one way or another. Willingness sometimes has to be coaxed but it's hard to force it. But without willingness, no profound change will be made.

Sometimes we hear the same message over and over again, but it may not be until the umpteenth time that it sinks in and we get it. The difference is willingness. Sometimes it's a matter of someone nagging us, until that mysterious day when we finally listen and take the appropriate action. People have been talking to us about global warming and its potential disastrous effects for many years. Now, some of us are finally listening. But most of us are not yet willing to do something about it in a way that may make our lives more uncomfortable or inconvenient. Are we willing to take the steps that collectively may save the planet for future generations? Are we willing to transform our lives? Or do we wait until it is forced upon us?

In my life, sometimes God has had to resort to what I call 'cosmic sledgehammers' to get a message across to me. It seems it's not in God's plan for me to stay in one place, content though I may be there. My deeper listening skills were either 'off' or on 'pause' when I supposed to be getting lessons of letting go.

In the early 1990s, I had a law practice in the small town in Oregon and I wasn't enjoying it much. I had gone into it reluctantly with the sense that I was to learn some lessons about compassion and responsibility for others and after a couple of years, I 'got' very clearly that I had learned what I needed to and I should shut down the practice. But I didn't know what else to do for a living and I didn't trust the message implicitly and I hung on.

So as luck or God would have it, some clients who owed quite a bit of money to me declared bankruptcy and with my back to the wall financially, I had to look elsewhere. I said to God, I'll do anything, just let me stay in my house. Nothing came my way. Finally, I said I'd simply do anything. I learned of a job that fitted my skills in a small city 100 miles to the north where I knew noone. Within six weeks of getting that job, I had closed the practice, sold the house and moved - it all fell into place. I was affirmed that it was the right decision. I learned I had to be willing and I had to listen and obey.

So willingness is opening our hearts and our minds so that we can listen, translate and be transformed. As Friends, we know there are all sorts of listening. There's listening to other people's words and then there's listening to their intent - back to the 'blood of the Lamb'. Listening for the voice of God is fundamental to our form of worship. Gathering together in silence is a superficial description of the deeper gathering at the heart of the experience of our worship - we're listening deeply together to discern God's message for us.

At the last Triennial gathering of FWCC in New Zealand, my worship-sharing group which met daily all week included a pastor from East Africa. Because of visa difficulties, he and other Africans had arrived a few days into the gathering. He had never experienced silent worship or worship sharing groups as we practiced them there. Silence puzzled him. We had some interesting conversations and exchanges about the differences of programmed worship and unprogrammed worship. He introduced us to the joy of singing together in worship and to vocal prayer, his way of communicating with God. On the last day, he said, "Oh, I think I understand now what you have been talking about - why you worship in silence -- you have to be quiet so you can hear what Jesus is saying to you!" A case of translation and transformation for all of us.

The Quaker gifts of willingness, listening and translating have supported a great deal of transformation in the world. Let me thank you all and your predecessors and ancestors for the Quaker presence here in northern Ireland - the success this winter has come after years of quiet consistent presence and faith on your part. That's transformation for the lives of thousands of people and more remains to come. Your faithfulness in this work, I know, doesn't stop with an election.

Those gifts also underpin the work Quakers do at the United Nations, both in New York and Geneva. This work is done in the name of FWCC in agreement with American Friends Service Committee to manage New York and with Quaker Peace & Social Witness to manage the Geneva work. Separate committees set the policies for the work and FWCC appoints half of their membership so that Quaker voices from around the world can be involved.

The mode of that UN work is called quiet diplomacy. We work to listen to all the voices, to provide the off-the-record settings for conversations, to empower the voices of those who are the weakest. A recent success relates to a senseless war in northern Uganda; the New York office, cooperating with QPSW workers on the scene and the Africa Quaker Peace Network, worked quietly to get the matter to the attention of the Security Council which has now appointed a special representative for this conflict. We hope the work there will be just as transformative as your work here in northern Ireland.

Just as God forced the people to scatter away from the Tower of Babel through many languages, I do not believe he intended for the message of living together on earth to be shattered. Just as God gave the disciples the ability to speak in many of the languages of the pilgrims in Jerusalem on that Pentecost, he wanted the message of love - both for God and for each other - to be spread across the world. That message of love translates into all the languages of the world with and without words.

It's a message of transformation of the world. We can find great joy in it.

God is good / All the time.