Mother Claire's Sermons

  One of the most difficult things for native English speakers who are learning other languages is grammatical genders. For us, almost everything is a neutral “it”. The refrigerator, the window, the bag. I took German in college, and learned that in German, the refrigerator is masculine, the window is neuter, and the bag is feminine. It can be difficult to wrap one’s head around the knowledge that the language isn’t making an anthropological statement about the refrigerator being a man. When you aren’t used to grammatical genders, it’s easy to both laugh at cheese being “him” and then feel a little offended that god is also “him”. And at the same time, knowing that cheese and god are under the same grammatical umbrella might take the sting out of it all a bit. Sometimes the offense is merited. For example, in Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, a group of 100 women is the feminine gunay. A group of 99 women and one man? Switches to the masculine anthropos. It’s hard not