Glossolalia and Sarah Palin, Part 3

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.

Glossolalia and Sarah Palin, Part 2

Continued from Part One.

This was probably the first time that I waited for a spiritual experience that didn’t come. I had come to expect that the Holy Spirit would fill me, that I would be moved by a strong presence, and that the language would come naturally. With their arms around me, my mom and the elder continued to speak in tongues, and I waited for some movement, an idea, a feeling, a sign… who knows? I didn’t know what to expect, but I know I waited much longer than I thought was right. I thought I must have done something wrong, but they both encouraged me (dropping out of “their language” to English) to just “let it happen”. I was confused that no words were coming, and that I didn’t feel any differently, and I started to wonder if I was just supposed to make something up. That seemed like cheating, but I figured I just didn’t understand what it was supposed to feel like.

When the congregation would speak in tongues, it would go on for easily 10 to 15 minutes. The musicians would play several songs, and there was no feeling that anyone was watching the clock. So I knew there was time to let the Spirit come if it was going to come… but after a while, my expectations were lowered: I stopped expecting to hear a voice telling me what to say, I stopped expecting anything to take over my voice, and I stopped expecting to feel different than I did at any other time. I just started babbling, moving my mouth and “saying” whatever it was that came out. Mom and the elder were really happy about this, so I got positive feedback that I was doing it right, but I was really disappointed. I wasn’t speaking in tongues, I was just babbling because I had grown impatient, and they couldn’t tell the difference!

Aka taka makushna tlaka peno fada nehdo turi jembo krina tay ma kraypo kraypo jem

It’s pretty easy to make up syllables when you think that’s what you’re supposed to do. I tried to move around and not get stuck on a particular vowel, throw in a few of the “words” I’d said before, assuming that they meant Jesus or holiness or something like that. Some words should probably be long, some short, maybe a few more short ones than long… I just kind of went with the flow, and eventually the pastor was ready to move us along to something else. We shared a three-way hug, and the rest of the service continued.

The experience didn’t make me skeptical, it just made me think I probably didn’t understand what was supposed to happen. I was disappointed that people speaking in tongues didn’t hear the sound of rushing wind or have tongues of fire hover over their head as described in Acts, but church people always have reasonable explanations for why the things you expect based on a simple reading of the Bible aren’t that simple, so I just figured I had a lot to learn.

Concluded in Part 3, shortly…

Glossolalia and Sarah Palin, Part 1

Soon after Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain’s running mate and her Pentecostal upbringing was revealed, there was a swift denial from the campaign that she had ever spoken in tongues, a fairly common practice among Pentecostals. I grew up attending a Foursquare/Pentecostal church, and I think a little reminiscing may be in order.

When my family started attending Faith Center in Eugene, Oregon, I was about 8 or 9 years old. We’d switched from a Friends Church (an offshoot of the Quakers), and by comparison Faith Center was a lot more radical. The atmosphere was more exciting: organ and choir were replaced by a variety of instruments and vocalists, the congregants were unpredictable and ebullient, the pastor (a young Roy Hicks, Jr.) was direct, confrontational, contemporary and powerfully charismatic. The chairs had plenty of hippies who were slowly settling down and finding God – this was about 1978 or so.

Mom, my sister and I went to church once a week at first, but were eventually going Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night, with the occasional church function thrown in for good measure. We went to retreats, had special study times, socialized with church friends, and went to a week-long Foursquare camp every summer. Life and church were pretty much integrated… we went to Christian schools, too, until it was time for high school and there weren’t any Christian offerings that met my Mom’s standards.

There was a lot that seemed unusual to us about Faith Center, but speaking in tongues had to be among the more puzzling. There was a lot of time given to worship and singing before the sermon, and my memory is that speaking in tongues was not a frequent occurrence; individuals would occasionally speak in tongues if the spirit moved them, but it was rare (once a month or so) that the speaker would encourage everyone to do so. There was no reticence that I was aware of… in fact, the people saw it as a special event, a spiritual treat. The most common tone of voice used was adoration mixed with intimacy, as though dropping the language barrier allowed the members to express emotion that may have been too difficult to convey in English.

After we’d been at the church for a while, I was baptized and taught/initiated into speaking in tongues. These events did not happen together, but both were treated as significant spiritual milestones. Baptisms were public – there was a large hot tub in the sanctuary, a former gym – and noisily celebrated, but I first spoke in tongues during one of the occasions that everyone in church was doing it, so it wasn’t a spectacle. My mom and I had discussed that the next time people were speaking in tongues, she’d let a church elder know that I’d like to learn, and he’d guide me through it. So, while the music was playing and everyone around was worshipping, he and I had a little talk about what speaking in tongues meant, how simple it was to begin, and said that I was free to do so as the Spirit moved me. He and mom joined in with the other congregants, and I stood there waiting for something to happen.

Continued in Part 2, shortly…