Tongues?

In pursuit of the Holy Spirit

Maybe I give the impression that I'm not a fan of churches, which is not exactly true. At some stages in my life and during what the initiated call my Christian journey, I have been so happy with churchgoing that I felt a sort of void in my life if I missed a single week. For quite a few years, I would attend an evangelical church on Friday evenings and again on Sunday mornings, to experience the same music and sermon.

But stuff happens and then my enthusiasm turns off.

The first stuff that happened involved my mean Christian Scientist grandma not even trying to answer my questions about issues like how could anything be eternal. I could fathom how something could go on forever but not how it could never begin. And to such questions she would tell me that when I was older, I would understand. A brush off.

A few years later, I would have attempted church with my friend Henry because his three sisters were exceptionally beautiful. But their Pentecostal mother reminded me of my witchy grandma. She forbade Henry to go to school dances or to the pool hall or to hang out with fellows like me who must be scoundrels because we weren't churchgoers. Once a week, she attended a prayer meeting at a small church with a big window, so several times we parked outside and watched while a crowd of mostly mothers and grandmas shook and threw their hands around and wailed in ghastly voices.

After a break of several years, a dear lady I worked with invited me to see Billy Graham, who  convinced me to give church another chance, so I sampled churches in my neighborhood. I remember a Congregational and Methodist and Presbyterian. Though I had become an earnest Bible reader, those churches felt either too welcoming, too dull, or too patriotic for a draft-age fellow who couldn't decide what he felt about the Vietnam war. What they all seemed to offer wasn't so much God as a community of friends, and I favored the friends I already had. You could get to know them in Reading Brother Lawrence. So I moved on, with several of my un-churched friends, to Subud, short for sanscrit-based words that loosely translated as good tempered, kind, and surrendered to the way of God.

The basis of Subud is the practice of latihan, which the system's founder described as a source of guidance from what us Christians called the Holy Spirit. Though the founder and leader, whom we called Bapak (father) was Moslem, he taught that latihan could lead us to whatever faith might best fit our nature. All that was asked of rookies was that we surrender to the Dharma, the Way or Path. After doing so, we were considered Open, which I considered similar to being born again. For latihan, we would meet in adjoining rooms segregated by gender and there essentially cut loose: we could do or say or chant or sing whatever befell us. Latihan could get pretty wild, not a whole lot different than a Pentecostal prayer meeting, though a friend of mine once found himself naked at the conclusion of latihan and didn't recall disrobing. I'd bet that rarely happens among Pentecostals.

After a few years with Subud, when I didn't feel as enlightened as I had hoped to become, I moved on and for several years Bible-study-hopped, from the one dear Tony led to a Seventh Day Adventist, to Jehovah's Witnesses. For a year, I attended Quaker meetings that felt more like silent latihan than church.

By the time I returned to a Pentecostal church I didn't find anything very strange about shaking or chanting or the waving of arms or speaking what sounded like gibberish.

Still I am not always convinced that any certain person's behavior is inspired by the Holy Spirit. Some people are phonies, whether consciously or unconsciously. Others, like my friend Ron who later became a Baptist pastor, just need to cut loose. Before his conversion, he tried out a kind of therapy that allowed him to merrily smash things.

Maybe it's my suspicion of human honesty that explains my preference for Charismatic doctrine over the Pentecostal insistence that only speaking in tongues certifies true infilling by the Holy Spirit.  Or maybe it's because Henry's mother, after rescuing him from a high school dance, attacked him with her fists while yelling in a mysterious tongue.

God knows.

Happy forever.