I was in my early adolescence when Evangelical pop-culture found itself all a twitter over the discovery that ancient Christians used the Greek word for fish - ichthus - as an acrostic for identifying one another during times of persecution. The Greek characters provide the opening letters for each word in the phrase, "Jesus Christ Son of God Savior." The thing sort of took off and led to rings and medallions and bumper stickers and, for all I know, a boutique line of Spaghetti O's. I've never bothered to check the research but I figure it must be true; a quarter of a million Jesus Junk peddlers can't all be wrong. Or actually they can, but that's not the point.
What I'm wondering is if we can't upshift yet another notch and start using GHOTI for the same purpose. Stick with me.
A famous story (probably apocryphal) tells how George Bernard Shaw once argued that English spelling makes so little sense that one could spell "fish" "ghoti" by taking the "gh" in enough, the "o" in women, and the "ti" in tradition. So I'm pondering a new covert Christian code word to help us navigate the current wave of persecution. (After all, they no longer require our preferred form of prayer on the loudspeaker in public schools. Can lions be far behind?) Here's my idea: if the image of a fish inscribed with the corresponding Greek noun could cloak a Christ-follower, then using the actual English word would add a layer of obscurity. Then going to the Shawvian spelling would complete the coup, disguising our faith so successfully that we ourselves might not realize we were Christians. (And Heaven knows we leave ourselves few enough other clues. The ruse should be undetectable.)
I'm thinking about this on this final evening of our mission trip for two reasons. First of all, I've spent about six hours per day since Monday teaching English as a second language. Attempting to teach my language always embarrasses me because I become aware of what a train-wreck it is. English is a mashup of German and French with a smattering of pre-Roman British tribal tongues with Latin grammar mounting a desperate attempt to impose order. More than one house is "houses," but more than one mouse isn't "mouses" unless you're talking about those little devices that control your computer cursor, in which case it is - or they are. When I found myself attempting to explain why "champaign" rhymes with "plain" (why it was on the day's vocabulary list is an open question, but one that is above my pay grade), I had to laugh at the fact that the whole world really needs to learn this mongrel mishmash because it is truly the global lingua franca. "Ghoti" made a fair amount of sense by around eleven o'clock.
Secondly, the students with whom I have been working are mostly Muslim refugees from Burma. This means that, even if I had the language skills to share the gospel openly, I probably couldn't because they wouldn't listen. Instead, I wound up realizing that my only hope - especially in the short space of four days - was to encode the gospel in a form all but indecipherable in the short term. I had to be Christ with sufficient success to overcome the inability to speak Christ. I had to, metaphorically speaking, spell the gospel "ghoti" if I wanted to slip past the watchful dragons of several centuries of cultural bitterness and hatred. The idea is to be a Christian contaminant, like slightly sour milk that you drink because it tastes all right and that doesn't make you violently ill until a day or so later.
And the weird thing is that I won't know if I've succeeded until - well, maybe the judgment. It may be eternity before I find out if anyone decoded my stealth evangelism. Anyway, that's my thought for the day, and I'm going to wrap up because I want to get down to the Christian bookstore and buy my "Ghoti" bellybutton ring.
No comments:
Post a Comment