Let me first say this: No, I have not yet seen Mel Gibson's "Passion," and yes, I have been asked for a review/opinion/explanation of it many times in the last few weeks.

I have also seen, as I'm sure you have, many confused explanations and interpretations out there, about Christ, about Catholicism, and about art. I obviously cannot have an opinion about a film without seeing it, so what I want to talk about today is something else.

The unprecedented amount of religious questions about Gibson's film and the 36,000-plus people that attended this year's Religious Education Congress got me thinking. Those 36,000 people came because they were embodying one of the oldest definitions of theology we have --- "faith seeking understanding" and they came ready to work hard at it. I must echo the words of Jesuit Father Thomas Rausch as we both marveled at the energy present in Anaheim --- this gives us great hope in the church!

The Gibson controversy, the statements that are ill-informed, those that are off the wall, the polarization, the acrimony, just points to me to people who have not done their homework, their theological homework.

For some it is perhaps because they never cared about religion at all and they are writing for some fashionable magazine which requires they write about this film. For others, it is because they are cradle Catholics, or cradle Baptists, or Lutherans, or even Jews who have just received their religious name without ever going deeper.

Or maybe it's because in our schools and in our marketplace all talk of God is seen as out of place, and our young grow up without any consciousness that there might be something more to our life, to our communal life on earth, that dimension we call religious.

I just want to share with you a couple of the many experiences I had during this 2004 Congress that stand in stark contrast to the plight of the religiously uninformed. First, I want to tell you that all my talks were in Spanish, we spoke together in the language of our parents, of our tradition, in the language we first learned to pray. This is important for many reasons, but just to name two:

First, when we do religious education in a community's traditional language we support families. If the young are relating to their faith only in English, instead of in Vietnamese, Tagalog or Spanish, they can no longer discuss their faith with their elders. New languages are too difficult to learn after a certain age, yet our young have the capacity to be wondrously multilingual if we give them that opportunity. Deepening their faith in their traditional language allows for families to (paraphrasing Father Patrick Peyton's famous words) stay together because they pray together.

The second reason goes deeper: Religious faith and religious issues go to the very core of our being; they are the most central questions of our existence. Our religious tradition is not something we learn superficially, like traffic laws. I read somewhere that researchers found that when someone is dying they revert back to their native language, even if it is a language they have not spoken for a long time. Our language holds the key to our heart, and I mean the very words of a language which appear interchangeable to the untrained eye but which are not.

During our Congress workshop exploring the Gospel of John, we were able to understand the multiplicity of meanings of love shown in the several words used in the original Greek, because in Spanish we have a variety of very rich words for love. But there is more to the choice of language; it gives us access to a whole different reality. The Beatles' music has to be sung in English, Puccini in Italian, they belong and open up for us that particular world.

The other thing that was most apparent in the workshops I shared with my hermanas and hermanos was their hunger to know more, the lively curiosity, the probing questions, the infectious enthusiasm, the aha moments, which we write ¡ajá! but which universally mean, a light just went on in me!

I began my first talk with a prayer, and as is the custom intoned the words "oremos juntos," let us pray. I began praying to the Holy Spirit, intending to recite the whole prayer before asking for an "amen" from those present. But the stage of living beings before me was not silent, and from the cavernous ballroom arose a deafening sound, hundreds of voices in unison, unexpectedly repeating my every word. "Ven santo espiritu," we concluded after reciting the entire prayer together, "y renueva la faz de la tierra." Could there be any doubt as to the Spirit's wildly exuberant presence with us at that moment?

Later, there was the older woman who approached me after my next talk on La Mujer, and taking both my hands in hers told me… "Soy madre soltera… I am a single mother. What we learned here today has just helped me to understand my whole life, to look back at it, to make sense out of what did not make sense before." She embraced me. I was the one who was grateful.

I left Congress knowing that my friends in seminaries and universities across this nation have a vital ministry, the ministry of teaching, of scholarship which arises out of a community and returns to that community both to give and take back sustenance. Unlike the physicist, or the English professor, the theologian cannot just pass along information within the walls of a university, the theologian is called, pulled by many hands, to live with and learn through their communities of faith.

"Come Holy Spirit and renew the face of the earth," yes, indeed. Mil gracias por acompañarme.

Cecilia Gonzalez-Andrieu writes from the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley.