|
Apart from weddings, I rarely darkened the door of a church for ten years after prep school, where I attended daily chapel and Sunday services. If truth be told, I would not have darkened the door of a church then either, except that attendance was compulsory. I had been raised, after a fashion, as an Episcopalian. However, my father was never one to darken the door of a church himself, and my mother was motivated less by religious conviction than by some vague sense that church-going would be good for her children’s character. Alas, there was precious little in the behavior of her wayward progeny to validate this theory.
When I did eventually darken the door of a church, it was more out of a sense of desperation than of anything else. I was not intentionally seeking God, at least not in any formal sense. In fact, I was so far removed from anything overtly religious that I can only conclude, much after the fact, that God must have been seeking me. My wife, who was not particularly religious herself, was the first to recognize that I was going through some sort of religious crisis. It was nothing you could put your finger on, a certain restlessness, a gnawing sense of something missing from my life, even when everything outwardly seemed to be in place.
My wife saw a small item in the newspaper about a “charismatic mini-convention” being held at an Episcopal church not far from where we lived. I had no idea what a charismatic mini-convention was, and neither did she, but she practically ordered me to attend. “You need something,” she said, without specifying. “Go.” So I went. The setting at least was familiar, a handsome Gothic revival church on the main street of a small New England city. But the event itself bore no resemblance to any religious service I had ever attended before. Not to put too fine a point on it, everybody seemed to be having an enormously good time. The church was packed. People were singing and clapping and raising their arms in the air. There was a fair sprinkling of nuns in the pews, something you didn’t normally see in a Protestant church. An Episcopal priest named Terry Fullum was banging away on a piano up front, singing hymns that were far too jolly for the staid worship services I was used to. The impresario was a man named Lloyd Sweet, who ran an outfit called World Harvest Evangelism. Speakers would get up to “give their testimony,” which meant talking about how they had turned their lives over to Christ. All of them delivered variations on sentiments expressed in the hymn “Amazing Grace”: “I once was lost but now am found.” Their words were punctuated by exhortations from the crowd: “Say it, brother!” and “Thank you, Jesus!” There would be more clapping and raising of arms, and a strange sort of murmuring that I later learned was people speaking in tongues.
I found all of this highly unsettling, for reasons that were not entirely clear to me at the time. The whole thing was certainly pretty bizarre, but that wasn’t what I found so unsettling. At some point I realized I was getting caught up in it on a very deep level – deeper than my intellect, deeper even than my emotions. Part of me wanted to break for the exit before something happened that would change me forever. Unaccountably, I decided to stay. And when Lloyd Sweet invited people to stand up to give their lives to Christ, I was among those who stood. Tears streamed down my face. I felt like a perfect fool the whole time, and I suppose I was. Prayers were said, then we were invited to go back to a little chapel behind the sanctuary for a “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” I had no idea what that meant but figured, since I was already in way over my head anyway, why not? Along with a number of others, I knelt at the altar rail in the chapel, and a Catholic priest named Ray Introvigne put his hands on my head and prayed for an in-filling of the Holy Spirit. The effect was immediate and overwhelming. I felt as if all my circuits had been blown simultaneously. Somehow I managed to get myself home, although I felt completely -- if not legally -- intoxicated.
I remember my wife took one look at me when I walked in the door and asked, “What happened to you?” I couldn’t say, not then and not for some time afterward. What had happened to me, I later understood, was what had happened to Jesus’ disciples at Pentecost. They had gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish Pentecost festival when “a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind.”
And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
In my case, there was no speaking in other tongues, at least not at first. It was all well and good to surrender my life to Christ, but I wasn’t yet ready to surrender my tongue. However, as I was soon to discover, the spirit blows where it wills. One night I dreamed that I was speaking in tongues, and when I awoke I heard strange syllables coming out of my mouth. They have been coming ever since. Although I am always able to shut them off, they seem to arise spontaneously. As to what the syllables mean, I cannot say. They sound a bit like a baby’s babble or the singsong of an auctioneer. Although sometimes described as “ecstatic speech,” these utterances do not sound to me like any language I have ever heard. I believe they are a form of prayer, as Saint Paul described it, where “the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”
Speaking in tongues was originally associated with the apostolic church, although scattered references in the writings of the early church fathers suggest the practice may have continued for another century or so. St. Patrick, who lived in the fifth century, dreamed that the Holy Spirit spoke to him in a strange language, and heard these words before awakening: “He who gave his life for you, he it is who speaks within you.” Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century mystic and Benedictine abbess, sang “concerts in the Spirit” in an unfamiliar language. Early Quakers and Mormons were known to speak or sing in tongues. Apart from the apostolic church, the group most closely associated with the practice are Pentecostals, whose movement began at a tiny Kansas Bible college in 1901 and has since spread throughout the world. The charismatic movement, an offshoot of Pentecostalism, started in the 1960s and is now found in most mainline denominations.
Until speaking in tongues went mainline, if not mainstream, it probably ranked just above snake-handling on a scale of socially respectable forms of worship. Having grown up as an Episcopalian, I am not at all surprised that Dennis Bennett, the Episcopal priest who first introduced speaking in tongues to a mainline congregation in 1960, was asked to leave his post soon thereafter. The Episcopal Church, which jokingly refers to itself as “God’s frozen chosen,” has never been noted for the exuberance or spontaneity of its worship. How better to demonstrate the power of the Holy Spirit than to blow open the doors of the stuffiest denomination in all of Christendom?
After almost 50 years, I cannot say I understand the workings of the Holy Spirit any better today than I did when my own doors were blown open. The Spirit is indeed manifested by sighs too deep for words. It cannot really be explained by the stories we tell ourselves in the name of religion. And notwithstanding our unwieldy doctrines of the Trinity and the like, it has no theological content. Judging by reports of tongue-speaking in cultures and religions around the world, it is not even exclusively Christian. The Spirit blows where it wills, and when we hear the sound of it, we know only that God is praying to himself.
Acts 2
Romans 8:26
|
