MY BEST VOICE
When a student at St John Fisher a priest teaching English Lit used to invite one or another of us to read a passage aloud “in your best voice”. I always got a charge out of that phrase, as though any of us had a wardrobe of voices to choose from!
This evening I was at church for a rosary service, and I was enjoying saying our part of the prayers aloud, and I was sort of conscious of sounding very good to myself, almost as though it wasn’t really me that was speaking.
When the service ended, I started to leave, and an older lady in the pew in front of me turned around and asked if I am from Trinidad. When I said “No” she said, “Well then,
Why, she wondered, should you sound like you are from Trinidad? I told her that it was the Holy Ghost, thinking it seemed to resemble in a way the account of speaking in tongues at Pentecost. I don’t know if she intuited my meaning. The whole business made quite an unusual impression on me. And I took her characterization as a great compliment: I love the speech patterns of the islands.
