Tongue-tied

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

When I woke up, around four in the morning, the residue of gratefulness was still on me. I reached for my prayer book. I said the morning office. I dwelled over the Jubilate, Psalm 100: "O go your way into his gates with thanksgiving and into his courts with praise; Be thankful unto him and speak good of his name; for the Lord is gracious." The prayer book can usually say what I'm feeling better than I can, but on this morning, it wasn't enough. I wanted something to do, something to give God. I wanted a temple where I could deliver my first fruits or bread I had baked with my own hands.

I tried just talking to God about how grateful I felt, but that didn't get me much closer: "I feel really grateful," I said. "I want to thank you for all the amazing things you've given me, all the friendships, all my relatives. And I want to thank you for the gift of feeling grateful." It fell flat. I may as well have been reciting my grocery list.

This is what Hannah meant, I thought. This is what she meant when she said that she couldn't always come up with the words to say to God. This is what she meant when she said she wanted to express things to him that she could not express all on her own, that she needed the Spirit to give her the words.

I turned to a bookcase and found Dennis Bennett's book How to Pray for the Release of the Holy Spirit, which I had read about two years before. I began to read it again. I read it through four times that morning. (It's a short book.) Bennett distinguishes between two types of speaking in tongues. He calls the first "`the gift of tongues'--that is, a special kind of speaking in tongues in which someone brings words from God to a group of people." Not all Christians, writes Bennett, are given that gift, just as not all are given the gift of teaching or healing or leadership. Bennett calls the second type of speaking in tongues a "prayer language," with which one "simply ... speak[s] to God, but instead of using the words you know in your own language, you trust the Holy Spirit to give the words He chooses in whatever language He selects--perhaps in a brand new tongue that's never been spoken before." We only had to ask God to give the gift to us, and he would. It was a birthright.

I sat on my couch and I began to pray for a prayer language. I wanted to make the creek-rushing sounds. I wanted to be able to thank God with words bigger than any words I had. I wanted to be able to praise him effortlessly, to not have to think of sentences all the time, to not be constrained by my own small vocabulary.

OK, God, I thought. Go for it. Any time now.

Dennis Bennett, had he been in the room with me, would have reminded me that then I was supposed to open my mouth and start talking. And if the Spirit was going to gift me with this language, it would come out. It certainly wasn't going to come out if my mouth was shut.

But I didn't open my mouth. It was as glued together as if I'd just eaten the world's stickiest peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.