Tongue-tied

Christian Century, Sept 25, 2002 by Lauren F. Winner

THE STORY OF PENTECOST, in the Book of Acts, is where we learn about speaking in tongues. The immediate manifestation of the Spirit in Acts is the apostles' sudden ability to speak in languages they don't know, and to understand one another. It is the inversion, and the restoration, of the Tower of Babel, way back in Genesis, when the people were idolatrous and fighting with each other, and God cursed them all with different languages, rendering them unintelligible to even their nearest neighbor. The denomination of Protestants most given over to glossolalia (literally, "tongue babbling") takes its name from the holiday. They are Pentecostals.

I have heard people speak in tongues; it is a lovely, lilting, creek-rushing sound, like the keys at the high end of the piano dancing very quickly. Some of my proper Episcopalian friends write off glossolalia as made-up. They can't find space in their picture of Christendom for tongue-speak.

Before the 1960s you would have been hard-pressed to find many Episcopalians who knew what glossolalia was, let alone spoke in tongues themselves. But in 1959, Dennis Bennett, a priest at an Episcopal church in Van Nuys, California, began to speak in tongues. His bishop and his congregants responded by removing Bennett from his post. He quickly found a new parish in Seattle, and from his pulpit there he sparked what is called a charismatic revival within the church. "Charismatic" comes from the Greek charism, "gift"--as in, "Speaking in tongues is a gift of the Holy Spirit."

Hannah, now a Baptist, grew up Pentecostal. I asked her, shortly after we first met, if she still speaks in tongues. "Oh, sure," she said. "I don't have the gift of prophecy, so I don't try to communicate with anyone else in tongues. But I talk to God in tongues all the time. Otherwise, I simply wouldn't know what to say to him. I want to thank God for all the awesome things he has done in my life, but my words are inadequate. When I pray in tongues, the Spirit gives me the words."

That's what all my friends who speak in tongues say. They say speaking in tongues lets them relax into their prayers. They say that they might not know, in their heads, what words to use to thank God, that our vocabularies seem feeble when it comes to thanking God for the wonderful gifts he has bestowed upon us. In their prayer language, the Holy Spirit takes over. He gives voice to their thanksgivings.

I have thought gratitude or been grateful plenty of times. I have received a present and liked the present and have been known to write a thank-you note--one that, per my mother's instructions, didn't just gush about how much I appreciated the sweater or the book of essays or the leather belt, but actually said, in a specific sentence all its own (when I had read the book in question), that it had been just the thing on the long car ride to Virginia, or how the sparkly evening bag came in handy for the big party at school last week, how at least half a dozen people complimented me on it. I know what gratitude is, and I know how to talk about it convincingly, but I have only felt gratitude twice.

The first bout of feeling came the March after I was baptized. I was spending Cambridge's monthlong spring break in Charlottesville at my mother's house, a skinny four-story townhouse with a copper roof that the Board of Architectural Review has stamped suitably historic. For most of March, I sat on my bed in the top room of that skinny house, reading books and staring out the window into the treetops and getting over jet lag, writing long letters and learning the Book of Common Prayer. Then one night I was crouched on the floor, on the scratchy new terra-cotta-colored carpet, picking through all the books I couldn't afford to ship to England, and it hit. I couldn't believe what God had done for me, and I was grateful to my toenails. In evangelicals' argot, you might say that right there on the carpet I was convicted of my sinfulness. I was struck by the gaping gulch between perfect God and fallen me, and I was stunned with gratitude that, though I was small and sinful, God in his graciousness saw fit to draw me near to him anyway. It lasted for months, on and off, that feeling. I was on my knees all the time, giving praise, thinking I had some taste of what it meant to be an angel and do nothing but sing hosannas all day.

THE SECOND BOUT was more recent. I was lying on my couch one night, reading a book about friendship by Beth Kephart. She writes about how friends are hard to make and hard to lose and how the only vocabulary we have for those losses has to do with romantic breakups. But often the splitting apart of friends is harder, rarer, more long-lasting, grievous and generally devastating than any run-of-the-mill lovers' spat. My body lay on the couch like a valley, my head propped up on four fluffy pillows and my legs folded in, sit-up style, my back flat against the sofa's blue-and-white stripes. There I lay, listing all the friendships I had lost, all the people I'd betrayed or misled or just not kept up with, and then I felt gratitude again, felt it this time no less physically than hunger, felt the weight of it like a fog settling in over my stomach, felt it filling me heavy the way fruit fills a basket. Lying on the couch, I could not believe God had given me all these people to love. Even if I never had another friend ever, even if I spent the next 75 years ratting around lonely as a ghost of Christmas past, it would be too much ever to repay all that love. I slept on the couch then, blanketed by the weight of my gratitude, Beth Kephart's book under my pillow.