It was snowing, blowing and very cold the next morning. About ten o’clock the boys and I went out to dig a path through the drifts for the mailman. Somehow the intoxication of yesterday seemed very far away. Between shovelfuls I told Scott and Donn about the service we had attended. But at nine years old and six years old, their chief reaction was amazement that anyone would go to church when it wasn’t even Sunday.
I had some outgoing letters to give to the mailman, so I posted three-year-old Elizabeth at a downstairs window to watch for him and went back upstairs to my office in the attic. The boys’ school was closed on account of the snow, and as I listened to the ebb and flow of fortunes in the Monopoly game downstairs, it swept over me suddenly that the kids were right. That church service yesterday had been pretty silly. It was rude to jump up in the middle of a church service and talk out loud. It was ridiculous to wave your hands about over your head. I had been right in the first place: it was all an interesting study in group psychology.
“He’s coming!” In tones of great excitement Elizabeth announced the mailman. I went down and exchanged letters with him.
The first one he handed me had a Mount Vernon postmark, and I knew it would be from Harald Bredesen. I was disenchanted with the whole subject of far-out phenomena; back upstairs I found myself moving Harald’s letter to the bottom of the pile. At last it lay on the desk alone and I opened it without enthusiasm. Inside were several pages torn from Life magazine, dated June 6, 1958, with a little note scribbled across the top one: “Thought you’d be interested in this. H.B.”
I was interested, partly because it was written by a man I knew: Dr. Henry Pitney Van Dusen, then the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. But I was especially interested when I saw the subject. Dr. Van Dusen was writing about what he called the “Third Force” in Christianity, and he dealt in part with the Pentecostals.
What would the president of one of the great intellectual centers of the country have to say about these most nonintellectual people? I poured the last of the breakfast coffee from the pot and settled down to read about the trip that Dr. Van Dusen had just completed around the world. He stopped in twenty countries, and in each he visited top leaders of the traditional Protestant churches. Everywhere he met with the same deep concern over the phenomenal growth of the “nonconformist” religious bodies, especially the Pentecostals.
“Are you worried,” he asked an Anglican bishop, “because these new movements are reaching people you have not reached, or because they are drawing off your own adherents?”
“Both,” was the reply.
By the time Dr. Van Dusen had finished digesting the information he had gathered on his trip, he was speaking of “a third, mighty arm of Christendom,” standing boldly alongside the Catholic and Protestant arms. And at the hard center core of this third force was the Pentecostal revival.
There are several sources of strength which have made the third force the most extraordinary religious phenomenon of our time [wrote Dr. Van Dusen]. Its groups preach a direct biblical message readily understood. They commonly promise an immediate life-transforming experience of the living-God-in-Christ which is far more significant to many individuals than the version of it found in conventional churches.
They directly approach people—in their homes, or on the streets, anywhere—and do not wait for them to come to church. They have great spiritual ardor, which is sometimes but by no means always excessively emotional. They shepherd their converts in an intimate, sustaining group-fellowship: a feature of every vital Christian renewal since the Holy Spirit descended on the disciples at the first Pentecost. They place strong emphasis on the Holy Spirit—so neglected by many traditional Christians—as the immediate, potent presence of God both in each human soul and in the Christian fellowship. Above all they expect their followers to practice an active, untiring, seven-days-a-week Christianity.
Until lately, other Protestants regarded the movement as a temporary and passing phenomenon, not worth much attention. Now there is a growing, serious recognition of its true dimensions, and probably permanence. The tendency to dismiss its Christian message as inadequate is being replaced by a chastened readiness to investigate the secrets of its mighty sweep.
It was a remarkable statement.
I wanted to know more, so I wrote Dr. Van Dusen that same afternoon, asking for an interview.
Some ten days later Tib and I went together to see him. The visit was particularly meaningful to me because my own father had taught at Union until his death. Sitting in the Van Dusens’ apartment at the seminary, I could look across the quadrangle to the office that my father had occupied. Just around the corner, I knew, was my parents’ old apartment, where for six years we had brought the children each Sunday for a visit. The return was full of memories.
Dr. Van Dusen must have sensed what this homecoming meant to Tib and me, because he had gone to no little trouble to prepare tea. Trouble, because both his wife and his housekeeper were out, and he had made the tea himself. He sat down opposite us now and tasted the brew.
“Too strong,” he said, shaking his head. “Too strong. I’ve brought some ginger ale—maybe we can cut it with a bit of this.”
He took another taste of the concoction of too-strong tea and ginger ale, made a face and put it down. “Have some cookies,” he said. “I’m really glad to see you. You know, perhaps, that I’m very much interested in the Pentecostals.”
Dr. Van Dusen told us about the trip to the Caribbean, some years earlier, when he had attended a Pentecostal service for the first time. “You know,” he said, “that was a terrible indictment. To think that the president of Union should have to travel all the way to the Caribbean to attend his first Pentecostal service. Shocking.”
Dr. Van Dusen had come away from this experience with several impressions. The first was a strange one.
“I felt rather at home,” he said. “In spite of the vast differences—and they were certainly vast—I felt at home. I felt that I was stepping back in time to a primitive but very vital Christian experience. I do believe that Peter and Barnabas and Paul would find themselves more at home in a good Pentecostal service than in the formalized and ritualized worship of most of our modern churches.”
He came away, too, with an impression about tongues. As we had, he had watched and listened, fascinated, to people praying “in the Spirit.”
“It seemed to me,” he said, “that this speaking in tongues was a kind of spiritual therapy. It was quite unsettling, hearing tongues for the first time. But one impression stands out above the rest. I came away feeling that this was an emotional release of an ultimately healthy kind. It left people better off: released, relaxed.
“I’ve never had this experience,” Dr. Van Dusen continued, “but I can understand it best when I think of some of our great poets. They quite often reach a point where they simply are not communicating intelligible ideas. Blake, for instance, and Auden, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. All of them have written completely irrational phrases. They ‘don’t make sense.’ This, it seems to me, is what the irrational nature of tongues is all about. The human heart finally reaches a point where words—the dictionary definition of words—simply aren’t adequate to express all that cries out to be said.”
I was amazed at the seriousness he was placing on all this. But it was just before we left that Dr. Van Dusen made the statement that tilted the scale for me, that made me decide definitely that I wanted to find out all I could about the Pentecostals.
It was time to leave. Tib was on her feet, but Dr. Van Dusen remained seated; clearly he had one more thing to say.
“I have come to feel,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “that the Pentecostal movement, with its emphasis upon the Holy Spirit, is more than just another revival. It is a revolution in our day. It is a revolution comparable in importance with the establishment of the original apostolic Church and with the Protestant Reformation.”
It took me a while to grasp the significance of these words. Dr. Van Dusen was saying that this revival—yes, as represented in part by the arm-waving, tongues-speaking, hand-clapping little church Tib and I had visited on a Tuesday afternoon—was not to be compared with some crazy, backwash sect. It was not to be compared even with the founding of a major Protestant denomination such as Presbyterianism or Methodism; it was comparable instead to Protestantism and Catholicism themselves.
Tib and I drove home with our heads reeling. How was it possible for Dr. Van Dusen to compare Pentecostalism with the founding of the original Church! Was he all by himself in this feeling? Over the next few weeks I read widely on the subject. And just in this skimming over the surface, I discovered two vital clues.
First, I learned that the Pentecostal movement was far more widespread than I had dreamed. It included not only the 8.5 million members of “Pentecostal churches”; more significantly, it included an unguessable number of people in the traditional established churches, both Catholic and Protestant, who were experiencing the very same manifestations of a supernatural and unexplainable power in their midst.
And second, I discovered that Dr. Van Dusen was by no means alone in his evaluation of this phenomenon. Key figures in both the Protestant and the Catholic churches were expressing parallel concern. I made a list and tucked it away in a file I had started under the label “Tongues Stories” and promised myself that someday I would see these men.
The trouble was that these researches were threatening to take more time than I could spare. The subject fascinated me, but meanwhile there were the magazine assignments that produced our income. I felt an increasing frustration over it because I sensed that I had stumbled onto that Big Story that comes to every writer just once. And I couldn’t do anything about it.
And then something happened that completely changed the situation. At a neighborhood dinner party one night, I told the story of Harald Bredesen’s speaking Polish. I’d found it sure dinner-party fare: no matter what outbursts of indignation or hilarity it inspired, it always seemed to interest people. But that night there was a man at the party I had never met before, Sam Peters. As we got up from the table, Peters drew me aside.
“You know,” he said, “I’m fascinated with this story. I’d like to hear more. Could you come to my office?”
Peters, it turned out, worked for a book publishing house. I did go to visit him in his office in Manhattan and several weeks later found myself contracting for a book on the whole phenomenon of tongues and what they might mean, the publisher to support the research.
“There’s one thing we’d better keep straight,” I said to Peters at the end of our conversation. “You keep saying, ‘these tongues of yours.’ They’re not my tongues, Peters, and won’t be either. I’m interested, I’m intrigued, but I’m certainly not buying. I’m an Episcopalian, you know, and I guess we’re a pretty stuffy lot.”
Peters smiled. “I know. No one’s asking you to get involved. Just do a good job reporting. That’s all we ask.”
“Good,” I said. “Then we understand each other. I’ve always said the best reporter, anyway, is the one who keeps his distance.”