Tongues "Just let it flow. Don't think about what you're saying. Just let it come. Don't resist. Ohhh! Soh-rah-bah-bah-kee-ray!"
His hands placed firmly on my head, the pastor chuckled joyously as he continued in his prayer-language: "Ohhh! Soh-rah-bah-bah-kee-ray!"
It was not the first time I had received this special treatment in order to receive the much-coveted "gift of tongues". There was a lot of pressure for folk in my church to speak in tongues, and there was something defective about you if it wasn't an ordinary part of your life. I lost count of the number of times the pastor would lay his hands on me during the evening service, babble away in his tongue -- always the same "Soh-rah-bah-bah-kee-ray!" -- and urge me not to resist, but simply to "let it come out." I would lay awake on my bed at night and try earnestly to speak in tongues, but every time I was on the verge of it, I could never bring myself to do it. It felt phoney. And the pastor's "Soh-rah-bah-bah-kee-ray" felt every bit as phoney.
I did eventually start to speak in tongues, and it was a load off my mind: I was "normal" now; I had passed the main hurdle to being a properly Spirit-filled Christian. I can't remember exactly when I first did it, but I know for most of the years I carried on with it, I always thought at the back of my mind it was phoney. I can point to perhaps one or two occasions when the words were different, and something was going on inside me emotionally that didn't seem to tally with anything that was going on rationally -- perhaps on those occasions something was genuinely psychic or spiritual was happening. I don't know.
It was Pentecost last Sunday, and as you might expect my thoughts drifted back to my days in Pentecostalism. How bizarre -- and how disproportionate -- that I should have grown up as a Christian so obsessed with such unimportant issues as whether I babbled a few strange sounds in my prayers every day. Petty obsessions like those were characteristic of my spirituality back then.
I have only very occasionally tried Tongues again since leaving Pentecostalism. Words are important to me, but not the incomprehensible words of some prayer-language known only to me and God. Like Solomon said, the tongue holds the power of life and death. I love using words to heal and to build up. People use words and language to divide. To be frank, back in the Pentecostalism of my youth, tongues only ever seemed to divide -- they sorted out the haves from the have-nots, and they sent people soaring off into their own private world during worship, instead of drawing people into a worship experience together. On the day of Pentecost, God used language to unite, to bring people together, to heal the nations. Honestly, if my words can do that, I'm not really bothered whether I speak in tongues.
All right, I'll try it just one more time, for the sake of old times: "Tor-bah-nah-sah-kee-rah-mah-han-ah." Or something like that.
Dave
2:32:50 PM 
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