Peripheral Visions

Heraclitus’s river, never the same. Repetitive ritual and ecstatic expression, like continuity and discontinuity, are two sides of the same coin rather than opposites. Religious forms cluster around extremes of decorum and anarchy, formality and spontaneity. These seeming opposites often coexist in the same tradition, or grow one out of the other, as in Quakerism. Both make it possible to bypass or get beyond what can be spelled out linearly in reasoned prose. The familiar word enthusiasm once referred to such outbreaks of undomesticated religious fervor.
    My best opportunity to observe this complementarity came in the early seventies, when I joined a group of about twenty young, white Protestants who met weekly to pray in a suburban living room near Boston. This was what is called a “spirit-filled” or charismatic group, and I was drawn there by a double curiosity. I had been wondering, as a linguist, about the phenomenon called speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, which has been interpreted since the very earliest days of Christianity as a gift of the Holy Spirit. I was curious too about the movement of a style of worship associated with poor black and Appalachian churches into the middle-class mainstream, for beginning in the sixties small groups like this one began to appear in a range of Protestant denominations and in the Catholic church as well.
    Speaking in tongues turns up in the New Testament description of Pentecost (which is related to the Jewish feast of weeks, Shevuot, as Easter is related to Passover). The disciples, we are told, “were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there…appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1–4). The passage goes on to describe how Jews visiting Jerusalem from every country of the Diaspora heard the Galilean followers of Jesus preaching to them in their own languages. Peter then stood up and preached to that first great revival meeting, sometimes regarded as the founding of the Christian movement. The understanding at that time was that glossolalia involved believers speaking intelligibly in languages they did not know.
    Glossolalia seems to have kept turning up as the Christian movement spread, sometimes becoming a source of disorder and contention. Paul’s often quoted paean to love (charity) is part of a scolding he is giving to the church in Corinth for being more interested in dramatic manifestations than good human relations: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1). We memorized that passage at my school, but we understood that Paul was saying that love, which he goes on to describe in words of great beauty, is more important than eloquence, not that he was warning against the disunity created by spiritual fireworks. By that time, it was clear that the ecstatic utterances of glossolalia might correspond to no known human language, so they were ascribed to the languages of angels.
    The story highlights some of the paradoxes of religion: ecstasy and altered states of consciousness in conflict with community order. A vision that transcends differences becoming a source of conflict. The dream of standing up and communicating to people of all nations in ways that make sense to them is as different from the labored communication of the United Nations as the ancient dream of flight is from being stranded at Heathrow. It would be nice if the diversity of modern society looked more like the first Pentecost and less like the church in Corinth or the construction site at Babel.
    Paul disapproved of unintelligible utterances in common worship but accepted them as a form of private prayer, of communion. Similar behaviors are not limited to Christianity: they crop up all around the world, often associated with the idea of possession, demonic or divine, and often representing a kind of proof of direct inspiration. What they surely prove is that most individuals are capable of altered states of consciousness when the culture supports them, ways to move beyond the dreary doubts and blindness of the ordinary. Sometimes they inspire strength in adversity, leadership, extraordinary self-giving; sometimes they inspire self-righteousness and fanaticism.
    The evenings I spent sitting on a sofa in