One fateful night, when I was fourteen, my family visited the Pentecostal church affiliated with “Christian school.” The preacher that night invited people to come down the front and receive the “baptism of the Holy Spirit, evidenced by the gift of tongues.” I was curious about speaking in tongues. I wanted the gift purely because I wanted to be a good Christian, and my school and its church taught me that “everyone” was (or should be) capable of speaking in tongues, though my regular Sunday church couldn’t give two hoots about the gift and didn’t consider it of much value. The church I attended was sceptical about moves of the spirit, and cared more about Biblical interpretation and lifestyle transformation, than supernatural signs and wonders.
I decided to go down the front, with a mixture of openness and trepidation. I didn’t care for the distinction between receiving the Holy Spirit and receiving “baptism of / in” in the Holy Spirit. It sounded a bit convoluted that I should require additional baptism, since I believed I had received the Spirit when I said the sinner’s prayer at age four. But I also wanted every gift I could have. If miracles really do happen, I wanted to pray for them and see them. If Christians can speak in tongues, I want to speak in tongues.
When I was prayed over, I did not fall down under the weight of the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” I had no intentions of faking anything. If God wanted me to fall, God would have to bowl me over. I also had no intention of faking “tongues,” but the preacher did say I should open my mouth and start to speak. So I started with the alphabet: “Aba caba.” There seemed to be a lot of “ababababa” going around the group. After a little while, it did feel a bit fake and I wondered why God’s language hadn’t just come flying out of my mouth.
But I continued to pray about it for several weeks, maybe months. I kept asking God if speaking in tongues was a legitimate thing and begging God for the gift because I wanted to be legitimized. I could clearly hear that people experienced in the gift were not just muttering “aba caba” over and over. There were other letters and syllables in there. People seemed to latch onto a phrase and repeat it over and over like a meditation. They genuinely believed they were speaking in tongues and not faking anything.
I was about at the point of throwing in the towel, when I went on a brief “missions trip” to a country town in New South Wales (the state in which Sydney is located on the East Coast). A bunch of Pentecostal youth travel a few hours west to put on something like a concert for the country-bumpkin youth in a small country town further inland.
It was on this trip, during a prayer meeting, that I experienced something I described as the “loosing of my tongue.” I opened my mouth and started the “aba cabas” and all of a sudden another phrase popped out and I repeated that instead. It sounded like “abaca sundada cadadaka.” No joke.
I considered myself to be “speaking in tongues” from that moment. I never felt especially “baptised” or especially “gifted,” but I did feel like I’d joined the club. I fit in. And I didn’t believe I was faking it. I was legit.
It was the same year that I had been baptised in water, and I knew in my heart that this was no coincidence either. I believed that God saw my heart and that the Spirit had “come upon me” in a new way—almost like an experience of “confirmation.” I was water baptised, Spirit baptised, I spoke in tongues, and those simple facts made me feel more spiritual and more Christian. And it felt good.
Much later in life, I experienced further evolution of “speaking in tongues.” In fact, I was praying for healing from sexual trauma, and I spent several hours praying to music in my little apartment (a rumpus room in my parents’ backyard), and also singing in tongues. I did a lot of crying, maybe even some screaming, and my “tongues” came out in completely different phrases, with a very authoritative sound, like I was commanding change in my life. I was praying and believing for healing. That was probably the closest experience I have ever had to something truly transformative, spiritual… transcendent.
So when I talk about the gift of tongues, I’m not simply mocking Pentecostals and calling it all fake. I know how “real” it can feel. I know there are many people who truly believe in the power of speaking in tongues because they have felt a sense of peace, or healing, or change from their own use of the gift. I get it. It is real because we believe it’s real.
You see, there is power in speech. I mean, you can scientifically prove that human race—the homo sapiens species—has progressed in ways other species have not, purely because of language! Because we can communicate complex concepts, math, science, etc. through language. First we had to agree on symbols (pictures) having meaning, then on an alphabet and definitions of words. We did this in groups, so there are multiple languages across the globe. But with time, most human beings learn to speak, read, write and study language, and we have learned to communicate on a global scale! What a phenomenon. A miracle. A gift. Speaking in tongues. Speaking in languages.
Language has so much power. I first decided in my head: “I am going to write a book.” Then I said it out loud. Then I did it. Then I told people about the book I had written. How else do we create careers for ourselves and generate incomes, other than by using language?
The Bible talks about God speaking and then life appearing. What if the big bang was God’s voice? What if evolution is God’s creativity in action. First there is a thought about how to adapt and evolve, then there is a re-coding of DNA. Re-coding; re-writing… same kind of thing. Language. Tongues. Gift.
So here’s the thing. I’m not here to convince you that speaking in tongues is a legitimate spiritual gift. I’m also not here to convince you that it is totally make-believe, since make-believe is all about language and creativity and creates whole new worlds of possibilities for us.
What if speaking in tongues is both and… What if I made up various phrases and my tongue stumbled upon sentences I’d never spoken before, and I attached meaning to them in my heart: I am communing with the Spirit of God. I am praying. I am meditating. This feels good. This is impacting my soul. I am healing. I don’t know how it happened. It must be spiritual. All I did was make some nonsense words (literally words I cannot understand) come out of my mouth, and I look back on that experience with the knowledge that my life changed course—very gradually. That speaking in tongues actually impacted me, and arguably for the better.
This is not unlike having a baby. I don’t know about you, but I scream bloody murder when I am in labor, because I avoid taking drugs as much as possible. I’ve had two vaginal deliveries; no epidurals. But I screamed. I cried. I squeezed the shit out of stress balls. I wailed and moaned and gasped. There was a ton of sound coming out of my mouth for hours, but very few words. Very little that actually formed sentences or made “sense.” It wasn’t “sensible” language, it was guttural language. It was an expression of physical pain. It was an expression of labor. It was an expression of being very much alive and not wanting to die, though feeling right at death’s door. I also don’t lie down during labor. I squat and I sway. I’m dancing hand in hand with life and death. I’m bleeding and grunting and pushing and dancing and delivering a whole new life into the world. Birthing something new and different, an extension of myself and yet also something distinct from me.
Babies are birthed in language and dance—in the gift of tongues and the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
Is speaking in tongues fake or is it spiritual? What if it is both? What if it is as complex as any other language. We invented language, agreed on its terms and conditions, and now we use it to create whole new worlds. We pray in various languages; sometimes we know exactly what we are saying, and sometimes we just let out guttural screams and then the baby arrives. This is, in my opinion, both transcendent and spiritual, and yet also scientific, mathematical, and biological.
What has been your experience with the “gift of tongues”?
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