I. Experience

Right now, at this very moment, thousands of Americans are speaking a made-up language. “Shadyanta cosobro amibosho, yadeeante co so. Colonomiyato cami basa.” Their sentences swing with emotion — swells and hushes, murmurs and shouts.

In our church, being able to speak like that was a status symbol, and I wanted it. Not just for the status, but also because it would bring me closer to God. If you sliced open charismatic theology, you would find “speaking in tongues” near the center. To know God, it’s not enough to believe in Jesus: the Holy Spirit has to decide to dwell within you. Speaking in tongues is a marker, or “proof” of that inhabitation. Without it, you were a second-class religious citizen.

So on Sunday, when our pastor asked if anyone would like to receive the gift of tongues … I chickened out. I know, lame. Although spraying out a string of random syllables may sound easy, on the charismatic Christian understanding, it’s much more than that. God himself becomes a kind of divine ventriloquist, taking possession of your vocal cords and causing you to speak in tongues. It isn’t a skill you can learn, like riding a bike or preparing the perfect steak; it’s just a thing that happens to you.

So if it doesn’t happen to you, as it didn’t for many, it meant God had rejected you. Somewhere along the line, you hadn’t made the appropriate ablutions: perhaps you hadn’t repented for watching pornography, perhaps you weren’t asking sincerely enough — or, and this was never said aloud —perhaps you just weren’t worthy of God’s gifts.

But our pastor had a way of getting you past your doubts. The next Sunday he asked the congregation to close their eyes. Then, he asked those who wanted the gift to raise their hands. No pressure, right? Except he immediately asked everyone to open their eyes, and there I was, with my hand raised. No turning back.

I started toward the front of the chapel. There was an aura about the front. The worship leader stood atop the stage, emanating a hypnotic rendition of “I surrender all” from the keyboard. As I approached, I felt I was getting closer to the presence of God himself. My youth pastor was waiting for me and the few other brave souls making our way down the aisles. She arranged us into a circle and explained we were about to receive the Holy Spirit. She asked us to pray quietly.

She started to pray and speak in tongues herself, as if to gather the energy of the Spirit she was about to disburse. After a few minutes, she walked to one of my friends, faced her, put her hands on her head, and asked God to impart the Holy Spirit to her. I didn’t want to seem like a snoop, but I cracked opened my eyelids just enough to watch — was it going to work? Would the syllables just spew out of her mouth? What would it sound like?

After a couple minutes, she began making sounds resembling speaking in tongues. It seemed to escalate, and my youth pastor declared she had received the gift. Whew — I had a chance, I thought.

Finally it was my turn. My youth pastor repeated the process she used on the others, but after several minutes of praying, nothing like praying in tongues seemed to be happening. I began to panic. I was intently focused and desperate to speak in tongues, but the sounds just weren’t coming. She suggested I “grease the wheels” by repeating syllables like “da” over and over again. I wasn’t quite sure what that implied theologically — was that forcing it, and would that deny me a “genuine” experience? — but I didn’t have much time to think. So I uttered a chain of “da da da”’s, sprinkling in other syllables for what felt like ten minutes straight.

Gradually, and to my amazement, I began to feel less as if I was actively choosing the syllables coming out of my mouth and more as if they were being chosen for me. “Sha’s” and “shun’s” and “shal’s” began to tumble out almost unexpectedly, like a stream of consciousness I was witnessing rather than directing.

Speaking in tongues, it turns out, is a lot like singing “American Pie” by Don McLean. The word-salad lyrics mean nothing on their own, but precisely because they mean nothing you can load a lot of emotional freight into them. That’s why no matter your mood, you can belt out with absolute conviction “Bye, bye, miss American pie / Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry.” Anger, joy, disgust — they all fit in there. Like painting or photography, speaking in tongues eschews words to tap a purer emotional stream. And like good art, its expression is cathartic.

It was not always a rarefied experience, though.