When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
— Acts 2:1-4
Every year the feast of Pentecost draws my attention back to language—how it connects us, how it fails us, and how desperately we need it in moments of crisis. I worked as a hospital chaplain at a children’s hospital where parents often arrived in the worst moments of their lives: accidents, new diagnoses, cancer relapses, birth defects missed on ultrasounds. My job was to sit with them as their world fractured.
On my first day of training, as I watched a Spanish-speaking mother beg for her baby to wake up, I wished I could speak in tongues—not the ecstatic kind described in Acts, but simply to speak the language she needed. Instead, I learned to rely on translators, whose work is nothing short of sacred.
When an in-person translator was not available, we used a lime green video-translation machine—a tablet on wheels that can connect us to someone who speaks nearly any language. Nearly. Sometimes there were long waits for a translator to appear on the screen, making awkward small talk with families who know that devastation is coming once the conversation begins.
This is what I mean by devastation: I used a video translator to help a Haitian Creole-speaking family choose a funeral home and then called an Uber to take them home while I carried their child’s body to the morgue. I used a Pashto translator to help a family understand that their medically complex baby girl would not survive. I used a Spanish translator to tell a family which parish would hold their son’s baptismal record—the parish closest to the hospital, not the one in their hometown where they would soon bury him. The translators’ work is essential, but these moments are still clunky and painful. And sometimes, because language is fluid and particular, we make mistakes.
In the spirit of Pentecost, I want to tell you a story about language—and about mistakes.
Providers rushed a newborn to our hospital from a nearby adult hospital through a connected breezeway. Sometimes parents chase after the medical team, just a few frantic steps behind. But Baby Beatriz’s father stayed with her mother as she recovered from her C-section. I would not meet him until the next morning. (I have changed identifying details in this story to protect the family’s privacy.)
Beatriz was born with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia—a defect where the diaphragm does not fully form, allowing abdominal organs to slip into the chest cavity. She required ECMO, an extreme form of life support that replaced the work of her heart and lungs.
Before her father arrived, we were told that the family spoke only Spanish. After he arrived, we learned he actually spoke Kaqchikel, a Mayan language indigenous to Central America. We learned this because we had asked an in-person Spanish translator to meet us in the room. She broke down the provider’s updates—Beatriz is very sick, her heart and lungs do not work without these machines. Her father, Diego, listened politely and then spoke directly to the translator. She blanched. “He says he doesn’t really speak Spanish,” she told us. “And his wife doesn’t speak any Spanish at all. We need a Kaqchikel translator.”
We moved the lime green video translator into the room, and it stayed there 24/7. But accessing a Kaqchikel translator was difficult. Sometimes we waited 25 minutes before someone appeared on the screen. A lot can happen in 25 minutes.
For those first few days, I relied on body language. When Maria arrived, still in her hospital gown and clearly in pain, I offered her a crocheted blanket donated by a local church. She nodded, and I draped it over her shoulders. She slept on the plastic couch in the room, wrapped in that blanket, watching over Beatriz and recovering from her own surgery.
On day three, we baptized Beatriz. The in-person Spanish translator helped, and the bedside nurse gently laid a white baptismal gown over her tiny body and all her tubing. Her parents made the Sign of the Cross on her forehead and whispered prayers I could not understand. Except, of course, I knew what they meant.
Days later, her body exhausted, Beatriz died in her mother’s arms. It was the only time Maria ever held her. She and Diego wept, kissing their daughter over and over, brushing her hair with their fingers. Staff kept vigil outside the door, ready to meet any need.
After an hour, they asked for me. With the help of a Spanish translator, the social workers, and the virtual Kaqchikel translator, I explained what would happen next. We talked about burial and cremation, costs and timelines. The family lived far away and lacked reliable transportation; my understanding was that they agreed that Beatriz would be cremated at a nearby funeral home and her remains shipped to their home. Because Diego spoke a little Spanish, I made sure the funeral home had a Spanish-speaking staff member. Then I slipped out to arrange logistics.
Later, Diego and Maria said they needed to leave. Of course, they didn’t want to leave. But they had other children at home, and Diego needed to return to work at a factory. They planned to take a bus west that evening. I remembered one more form—the body release form—and asked them to wait while I gathered the translators one last time.
This is just a formality, I thought. “By signing here, you give the hospital permission to release Beatriz’s body to this funeral home,” I said. “They will perform the cremation and mail her ashes to this address. Is this correct?”
The translator conveyed my words. Maria gasped. She spoke rapidly to Diego; he spoke rapidly back. They looked at the translators, shaking their heads.
“Wait,” one translator said. “This is wrong. They do not want the burning. They want her body to be whole.”
Kaqchikel, I quickly learned, does not have a single word for cremation. The first translator must have used a different phrase. The new translator on video now used words they recognized as burning or fire, and when those words were connected to their daughter’s body, they recoiled.
We pivoted quickly. I called the funeral home again and contacted an aid agency in their hometown that could help with burial expenses. Still, my hands shook as I helped Maria and Diego leave the hospital. I pushed her wheelchair toward the parking lot, replaying every moment, wondering where the misunderstanding began. I handed Diego a bag of Beatriz’s things: her baptismal gown, a handful of plastic rosaries, the sign with her name on it, the shampoo we used for her first and only bath. I placed the crocheted blanket over Maria’s lap as she was buckled into the transport van, and we kissed each other’s cheeks. As the van pulled away, I saw her lift her hand behind the tinted window and offer me a gentle wave.
And then I wept. I wept because babies die and because poverty is real and because their hometown seemed so painfully far away. I wept because I do not know Spanish or Kaqchikel. And even if I did—even if I did—Beatriz still died, and Maria was still crying, and she was still waving at me.
In the Pentecost story, the crowd is bewildered because “each one heard them speaking in the native language of each.” Language is a slippery, sacred thing. Translators make dignity possible in health care settings, and I fought for that access for every patient I encountered.
But alongside this sacred task of translation, I am learning to speak in the way Christ calls us to speak. This, too, must become our native language. In the draping of a blanket, the holding of hands, the sitting in silence, I can use this tongue of fire as a language of compassion. It requires practice and patience. And I make mistakes. But it is good and holy work to speak in this way.
When I close my eyes and think of that day, I see Maria waving at me through the tinted window of the van, the warmth of her cheek against mine as she kissed me goodbye. And I think about everything I could understand.
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