Start with Part One if ya like.
The evidence suggested that other people weren’t just making it up as they spoke in tongues. Once in a while, interrupting the service, a man would stand up and begin speaking in tongues. Things would halt as the congregants absorbed the message, and after a few seconds or minutes someone else would rise and give a translation. People got very excited about these messages, and the minister would say something to amplify or comment on some aspect of the translation, and remind us how remarkable it was that God could speak to us so directly. This message-translation pairing convinced me that speaking in tongues was “real”… because if Alan was just making it up, how could Terry give a translation?! Surely God was speaking directly to us through these men – it was always men, as I recall – and we felt very blessed to experience such a thing.
As I got older, I started to wonder what the original speaker had said, and tried hard to “listen” to what the spirit would say. I wanted to be able to stand up and either offer a message from God, or be able to help everyone understand what God was saying. Over and over, the only message I ever heard was that “Jesus wants us all to know that he loves us”, which was nothing at all like what the eventual translation would be. The translator would stand up and talk for 2 or 3 minutes, and it would always sound the same to my young ears… words straight from the bureaucratic syntax of the church, the seminary, the predictable material of a prayer or sermon. I gradually got bored by the translations, because they struck me as far less remarkable than what I expected God to sound like. The Russians could nuke us any minute… why wouldn’t God say something about that? Why wouldn’t the translation have a striking resonance, an inimitable authenticity? I chalked it up again to my limited experience and training.
The most amazing “message” that ever came was the one that had no translation. This happened when I was in my mid-teens; a man stood up and delivered a message in tongues, and sat back down. Pastor Roy Hicks waited for a minute or two, but no one stood up to offer a translation; Roy looked at the man very seriously and said he needed to see him after the service. This was extremely interesting, and was a topic of conversation in my house for some time to come. We didn’t know the man who had stood up, but the fear was that the message he had was not actually from God… it might have been from Satan! No one was able to give a translation, so the immune system of the Church had been strong enough to resist the attempted infiltration, thankfully. We discussed this from time to time, wondering what happened in the conversation between the pastor and the man. We knew that Pastor Roy was a very stern and experienced practitioner of spiritual warfare, and that he would likely want to be sure that the man wasn’t succumbing to spiritual attacks. (Church doctrine was that we were all, each of us, daily under attack by evil spirits, and that by faithful spiritual practice we could stay safe from Satan.)
This “failed translation” event made a strong impression on me. I was starting to understand how science worked, and it was very exciting to see that the church had tangible methods in place to test the provenance of spiritual methods. If the tests worked, we could be sure that the only messages that were translated were those that really came from God. If that was true, then even though I thought His messages were kind of unremarkable, it was still exciting to know that they were legit… if they were just people faking it, the community would be there to catch it! Peer review, indeed.
In the next few years I graduated from high school and went off to college. When religion came up, I’d explain my background a little, and sometimes people would exclaim, “You spoke in tongues? Did you guys handle snakes, too?!” I came to expect the question, but it was pretty surprising at first. Handling snakes seemed so crazy… surely people didn’t think the same about glossolalia, did they?! But the two have fairly similar scriptural foundations; it’s no more crazy to do one than the other, leaving aside the risk of death by snakebite. Religious people do any number of remarkable and illogical rituals, with varying degrees of poetry, risk, symbolism and lies behind the original inspiration and its contemporary continuance. You can buy just the slices you want – but if you do, you probably ought to take the whole loaf.
So college was interesting. My natural skepticism gradually led me to where I am now: an agnostic who strongly suspects there are no Gods or anything like Them in the universe, but who still finds the whole subject fascinating. When the McCain campaign recoiled from the suggestion that Sarah Palin might have ever spoke in tongues, I thought it would be a good time to mull over my memories of the subject.
In preparing to write this essay I even did some field research and “spoke in tongues” for the first time in about 20 years. It was about like I remembered, and I felt a little of the sheepish embarrassment I’d felt as a 9-year-old just meandering through the alphabet trying to make things sound kosher.
I hope you found this interesting! Comments are welcome.
Wow. Interesting stuff there, pal. Amazing how many people have fascinating and unpredictable episodes in their past. Thanks.
Thanks for reading! Yeah, I have a bunch of stories about my Pentecostal days, I should probably blog ‘em. My millworking and blackjack-dealing days might make for a few good posts, too.
Great story. The moment for me was when you grew impatient and just started babbling. I was raised Southern Baptist (Southern Baptist convention) and I had a friend who went to Vineyard Christian Fellowship which is a non-denominational version of a Pentecostal church.
My friend would tell me about how the spirit of the lord would knock people over in church. That people would literally fall back as if pushed by a strong force. Of course I wanted to be knocked over by the spirit of the lord too. So I went to her church. I saw people talking in tongues. I saw people rolling around the ground laughing. It was actually a little chaotic to hold my interest. After a few times, I realized that I wasn’t going to get knocked over and I stopped going.
Thanks for posting this. It was very interesting.
This is a great essay. I had a similar experience growing up in a fundamentalist church. We didn’t speak in tongues, but there was the same expectation that the Holy Spirit was at work in the church, and the same gnawing suspicion – and eventual conviction – that half the people there were mistaking their own emotions for supernatural events and the other half were doing what they thought was expected of them.
It’s sometimes hard to describe the excruciating cognitive dissonance that a child feels growing up in a fundamentalist church, but you’ve done it very well.
And you’ve also captured the fact that these kinds of churches can be very fun – which is why they’re so popular.
Hi..
)
I just happened to come across your post. I went to Faith Center too..probably..early to mid eighties?
I have to say one thing about Roy Jr. I know what you mean about the bizarre nature of the Charismatic faith, but..I have to say–out of all the ministers I’ve known..and I’ve known a lot of them–none of them had the level of integrity that Roy did. I’ve yet to meet another like him.
He had no problem nailing..a problem! I started out–living in Bend. The pastor we had there was out of Faith Center. He would constantly complain about how “mean” Roy was. Roy..didn’t mince words when it came to wrongdoing. My pastor–had problems with that.
I’m so glad I got to know him. He really was one of a kind.
Charlotte Groth
Rio Linda, CA
Thanks for the comment! Yep, I’d tend to agree about Roy’s character. He seemed to have a lot of integrity, and really deeply wanted to do the right thing… wanted everyone else to do so as well, of course.
The thing is, as I grew into my mid-teens, it started to bother me that the church became more affluent, and that it was kind of a running joke that Roy had a really fancy sports car (a Corvette, maybe? It was black) and he was always getting speeding tickets. At that time I was starting to take Jesus’ message about materialism seriously. His message of “sell all that you own, give it to the poor, and come and follow me” is pretty straightforward, and kind of hard to square with the behavior of most Christians except for monks and nuns. The whole Corvette thing seemed like such a flagrant deviation from that, and it took a little of the shine of Roy for me.
Having said all that… the same would be true for plenty of preachers, and Roy had uncommon leadership and inspirational gifts that more than made up for his faults. I guess it just began to bother me how much modern Christianity misdirects its energies away from serving the poor and towards politics and meddling with other people’s rights.
Ugh, this is getting too long. I’ll make another blog post sometime!
It was very interesting to read your comments. I was at Faith Center during the same time period as you. Roy, even in death is an inspiration to me, an example of someone who lived what he believed. I only hope that my own life will be as much of an inspiration and shining example of the life of Jesus as was Roy’s.
This is a very interesting post. It reminds me of This American Life. Very well written.
I had a coworker that went to a Pentecostal summer camp as a little girl, and the campers learned to speak in tongues. But the coworker never picked up on it. She returned to her cabin, and there was Susie or whatever her name was, still speaking in tongues, and my coworker thought, “OK, little miss tongues, enough already. You think you’re so cool. What is wrong with me?”