But if we were living in the middle of a revolution, it was hard to find the way in which it touched our daily lives. Our new lawn was all hills; I went to the end-of-season sales and priced power mowers. Tib got out the kids’ winter clothes and went through the annual trauma of discovering that nothing fitted.
A letter came in the mail from the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International. Reservations for two had been made in our name for the convention two months away; would we please send in our check. Charles Maurice had not forgotten. His enthusiasm over the long-distance line in the spring had made the convention sound interesting, but now the whole thing looked deadly dull, and I was sorry we’d gotten involved. I put the letter in my “To Do” folder, along with an ad for a reduced-rate subscription to a magazine I wasn’t much interested in. Both were suggestions I might follow up on. Someday.
I was taking the train into town almost daily now. I’d decided to get some tape recordings of people speaking in tongues, with the idea of playing them back for some language experts and seeing what they made of it all. Our home in Chappaqua was too far away to ask people to come to, so I was holding the recording sessions at Guideposts’ office in New York City.
The Guideposts staff had gotten quite accustomed to the energetic Pentecostal personalities coming in to talk on the tape machine. The first time the receptionist was greeted with a resounding, “Good morning, sister! Is Brother Sherrill in?” her answer had a chilly edge to it. But before long she was “brother”-ing and “sister”-ing with the best of them and actually looking forward to these little explosions in the routine office day.
For the actual recording I would take my visitor into a private office where the machine was set up, and shut the door. If I hoped by this to insulate the rest of the office from distracting sounds, it was a wasted gesture. Pentecostals are notably unself-conscious about tongues. The volume of sound would swell, strange syllables and rhythms would pour from the little room where my guest and I sat, and from the hush in the outer office I could tell that all activity had ceased and every ear was tuned to the closed door.
Tongues became a favorite topic of conversation at coffee breaks, replacing even the World Series in liveliness. The reactions of the various typists and editors seemed to range from amusement to hilarity. My birthday rolled around and beside the traditional cake with which the office honors such occasions, I found a small package. Inside was a miniature Greek vase with a long inscription in Greek characters running around the rim.
“It’s Greek to us, John,” read the note tied to the neck, “but keep recording. Happy Birthday.”
The ribbing was always in fun. But I thought it expressed, too, the serious doubts that many at the office were feeling about this phenomenon, which I certainly shared. Dina Donohue, our departments editor, summed it up for us all one rainy noon when we’d had sandwiches sent in from the delicatessen. As we sat around the table in the outer office, Dina announced, “I can speak in tongues too. Listen.”
And off she went: strange grunts and clicks and nonsense syllables, delivered with much expression and all remarkably language-like. There was a round of applause for Dina’s fluency, but in the silence that followed, my secretary said, “Do you really mean to say you can tell a difference between what Dina just did and these ‘tongues’ these people claim to be speaking?”
And I had to admit that I personally could not.
Wasn’t that the whole problem in a nutshell? Not that tongues-speakers were trying to deceive anybody, but that they had utterly deceived themselves. Under the stress of religious emotion and with a strong tradition leading them to expect certain happenings, weren’t they mistaking for the workings of God Himself a simple gibberish such as anyone could manufacture?
It was while these thoughts were strongest in my mind that I had a visit from Lydia.
I’d heard of Lydia Maxam from several different people. “Aristocratic” was the word most frequently used to describe her. She was a Philadelphia main liner, an Episcopalian, and one of the few non-Pentecostals who had agreed to speak in tongues into my tape recorder.
I liked Lydia the minute she walked into the office: tall, dignified, smiling. “There’s a condition on my agreeing to talk into that apparatus,” she said when we were alone in the little room and I had explained the workings of the recorder. “To me, tongues are always prayer. A special kind of prayer, too. I use them when I’m praying about a problem to which my own mind has no solution—usually a prayer for somebody else when I can’t possibly know all the factors and complications.
“So if you want me to speak in tongues, you’ll have to let me pray about some real problem—preferably one that concerns you, or someone close to you.”
I thought for a moment. There was nothing really pressing—and then I remembered Tib’s manuscript. This was a magazine story on which she’d been working for weeks. Version after version had ended up in the wastepaper basket, and that morning she’d told me, as near to tears as I’d ever seen her over her work, that the deadline was tomorrow and she felt no closer to a solution than the day she’d accepted the assignment.
I described the situation to Lydia. “Is that the kind of thing you mean?”
“Exactly,” she said. “If your wife were here, I’d ask her to sit there in that chair. Then I’d simply place my hands on her head and ask the Holy Spirit to enter this situation. I’d ask Him to remove whatever distractions or personal problems were blocking the perfect understanding that is one of His gifts. I’d ask Him to take over this story to His own glory. Tongues would simply be a token of yielding my will and understanding to His.”
In the absence of the person for whom the prayer was offered, Lydia said, someone else could sit in for her. Would I sit in the chair in Tib’s stead and receive the prayer on her behalf? I agreed, and right away was sorry. Wouldn’t I be terribly conscious of all those listening ears outside the door? How could I go along personally with something about which I had such mixed feelings?
But it was too late to back out. I turned on the recorder, placed the chair at the window, as far from the door as it would go, and sat down. And immediately was faced with something worse than listeners. Looking right into my window was a dress manufacturer’s loft where about fifteen girls sat at sewing machines and seemed, it suddenly occurred to me, singularly disinterested in their work. Our two windows had stared at each other for many years; this was the first time the fact had ever bothered me.
Lydia, however, seemed oblivious to our surroundings. She stepped behind my chair, laid both hands lightly on my head and began to pray, in English, for the healing of whatever was blocking Tib’s creativity. One of the girls in the loft glanced our way. She said something to the girl at the next machine, and now they were both looking at us. I closed my eyes to shut out distracting influences, but this made it worse, for now in my mind’s eye the entire factory staff was gathered at the window staring at the elegant lady praying over the guy with the balding top.
The humor in the situation was too much for me. I started to laugh but swallowed it because Lydia was praying with such obvious sincerity. And it was at this moment, while I was still struggling with laughter, that an extraordinary thing happened.
With no change in the tone of her voice, Lydia began to pray in tongues. And at that instant I felt—actually felt—a wave of warmth pass from her hands into my head and then swiftly down through my chest and arms. The sensation was of heat, but without the effect of heat: I didn’t feel flushed or hot. It was like coming close to some immense source of heat, a blast furnace or a sun, that had no burning quality whatever.
This lasted all the while Lydia’s prayer in tongues continued, though the sensation was not so intense after the first moment. And suddenly I discovered that I was crying. Huge tears were rolling down my face and plopping onto my necktie. The tears were no more related to my emotions than the heat I had been feeling was related to the radiator in the wall. I was acutely conscious of the girls in the next building; I didn’t dare open my eyes for fear of meeting theirs. As Lydia continued to pray I grew more and more self-conscious. When at last she finished and lifted her hands from my head, I swung the swivel chair sharply away from the window and busied myself for a long time with the tape machine. In the outer office, typewriters abruptly started clacking.
Lydia left a short time afterward, as cool and poised as though we’d been discussing the opening of the ballet season, but I stayed alone in my small office most of the day. I had a lot to ponder, a lot to sort out in my thoughts. I felt like a man who had stooped to pet a kitten and found his hand on a tiger. What was the palpable power that had invaded this room with Lydia’s prayer in tongues? Was it possible that I’d been wrongly looking at this phenomenon as a mere incidental to something else? Did it have, in and of itself, some mysterious power?
Tib met me at the train station that evening, a cat-that-ate-the-canary look on her face.
“How’s the manuscript?” I said, as I slid behind the wheel.
“Mailed!” she said, moving over for me. “I dropped it in the box coming down. I don’t know why on earth I had such trouble with that story. It was so simple, when I finally did it! I’d been trying to make it so complicated. I sat down to it this noon and there it was, right before my nose. It almost wrote itself.”
I didn’t tell her about Lydia’s prayer. I didn’t know how to go about telling her. Before I did any more talking it was obvious I was going to have to do a lot more thinking, a lot more digging, a lot more investigating.
After dinner that night I wrote down three questions to which I wanted answers:
Does the Bible say anything about tongues having strange powers?
If they do have power, why did they fall out of use for so many centuries?
Do people who use tongues today report this power?
I started with the Bible. I got out my concordance the next morning and discovered that the New Testament contains some thirty references to tongues. But even the most cursory listing of them showed me that the Bible was talking about two very distinct uses of this phenomenon.
The first use was the one with which I was already familiar: where tongues are considered a sign that the Holy Spirit has entered a certain believer. The tongue seems to have little importance in itself; it is valued only as evidence of something else.
This use of tongues is first spoken of—at least in order of appearance in the Bible—in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus has been crucified, has risen from the dead and now appears to His disciples with instructions to preach the Gospel all over the world. “And these signs shall follow them that believe,” He tells them, “. . . they shall speak with new tongues” (Mark 16:17).
As the words of Christ Himself, this passage of course has great authority, and Pentecostals set much store by it. I soon discovered, however, that not everybody accepted it as equally authentic. The King James translation of the Bible was made from a manuscript called the Codex Alexandrinus, which dated from the fifth century and contained this verse. Earlier manuscripts, dating from the fourth century, however, do not contain the verse. Of course, in the fourth century Christ’s words may have been part of an oral tradition, not yet set down in writing. Perhaps the consistent experience of a large group of Christians convinced them that this tradition belonged as part of the written heritage of the Church.
The Book of Acts, written toward the end of the first century, and which no one has suspected of later additions, refers several times to tongues as a sign of the Holy Spirit’s presence. Three things, I thought, were worth noting about these references.
So far, tongues have been treated as a sign of the Holy Spirit’s coming. But when I turned to Paul’s letters it was obvious that he was looking at them very differently. Paul was discussing tongues not as a onetime outpouring, but as a continuing experience. They were important not only as proof of God’s presence but also because their use conferred certain benefits on the Church. They were a gift of the Spirit for the advantage of believers, to be used, along with the eight other gifts, for the upbuilding of God’s people. In Paul’s view, there seemed to be three principal ways in which tongues were of value:
The first letter to the Corinthians was written around A.D. 54. Paul was living in Ephesus when word came to him that the church in Corinth was in trouble. Among the irregularities and abuses that had crept into Christian practice was a kind of confused disorder at public worship, the result of misusing some of the gifts of the Spirit, especially tongues. The twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Paul’s letter are devoted to a discussion of these gifts, with considerable emphasis given to tongues. But in the process of cautioning Christians not to misuse their spiritual gifts, Paul left us with quite a clear picture of how they should be used. I went through the three chapters and made notes:
If, then, two manifestations of tongues, both the sign and the gift, were known to the authors of the New Testament, and if along with them went such obvious advantages, why did tongues ever disappear from the Church?
To this second of my questions I found an immediate answer: They didn’t.
Tongues continued to play a part in Christian experience down through the centuries. They were de-emphasized—probably as a result of such warnings as Paul sounded. People who experienced them kept so quiet about them that it is easy to miss the references to them altogether. But the minute I looked for them, there they were.
Way back in the second half of the second century, some Christians were complaining that the Church had lost its contagious fire. A revival led by Montanus urged Christians to look for a new Pentecost and to expect the same manifestations that had accompanied the first.
At first, Montanism was well received. Two of the most respected and influential of the early Church fathers, Tertullian and Irenaeus, found in the movement much that needed saying and gave it their support. But as tongues and other charismatic phenomena increased, Rome feared excess. Montanism was branded heretical and even the influence of Tertullian and Irenaeus could not soften the charge.
There were, however, other instances of charisma that were not so branded.
In the fourth century, St. Pachomius, who founded the first Christian monastery, was reportedly able to speak in both Greek and Latin, neither of which he had learned.
This mysterious ability to speak in an unlearned language crops up again in the fourteenth century in the experience of St. Vincent Ferrer.
And in the sixteenth century, St. Francis Xavier received the gift. St. Francis was one of the first Jesuit missionaries, preaching among the Indians and among the Japanese. He was reportedly able to preach in languages he had never learned.
Tongues appear at the beginning of many of the great revivals. The early Waldensians spoke in unknown languages. So did the Jansenists, and the Quakers and the Shakers and the Methodists. “While waiting upon the Lord,” wrote W. C. Braithwaite in an account of early Quaker meetings, “we received often the pouring down of the Spirit upon us and . . . we spoke with new tongues.”
Beginning with the nineteenth century, I found both more original source materials in the library and more references to tongues.
The difference between these random occurrences of tongues and the Pentecostal movement which began with the twentieth century, seemed to be that before Charles Parham and his Bible school at Stone’s Folly, no one attached any significance to tongues. There was no attempt to persuade others to do likewise, no evangelistic fervor in the wake of the experience. Tongues remain isolated, haphazard, unremarked. But remain they do.