Praying in Tongues

On Wednesday evenings I have a commitment at one of our local perpetual adoration chapels. I often go with a heart bursting with its need for silence, or a heart brimming with conversation with Jesus, or a heart full of thoughts of Him.

Tonight my heart felt like gravel in a coffee can. Every movement made unsettling clangings.

Ok, so I tried some of the things that are necessary when the romance of prayer is not sweeping me off my feet: intercession, spiritual reading, acts of the will towards my desired destination. It was rough.

I pulled out of my purse the notes I had taken at the CL Spiritual Exercises (which, unlike other people, I have not posted on my blog). Oddly enough (there is mild sarcasm here), they were in a far less legible state than I recalled from their creation. As I read through them, I prayed, in a whisper, in tongues.

Now, let me cut into my narration with a necessary aside to say why I feel like I have just broken a terrible personal taboo. I have been tussling a bit in the recent past with the fact of my charismatic "heritage" if you will. I had a profound encounter with Jesus who baptizes with the Holy Spirit when I was but 19, a good 5.5 years before I became a Catholic and long before the thought even cast a shadow over my mind. Before that time I was a conservative Lutheran and after five years among a charismatic fellowship I became a Catholic. It wasn't like I stopped being a charismatic when I became a Catholic, but I did undergo a huge personal shift, culturally, theologically, devotionally, spiritually. I maintained some contact with Catholic charismatic fellowships over the years, but for the most part, when I think about those spiritual experiences, my dialect shifts, or somehow I find myself thinking with categories that I used "back then," mostly because of being focused on different things when hashing things out with fellow Catholics, and not really trying to update and sort of refresh my understandings in the fuller light of the Church. (And then again sometimes I wonder if some of our separated brethren don't understand the Church's fuller light better than some Catholics.) It seems completely normal for me to have a wonderful spiritual resonance with other Catholics who "are not charismatic." And then you get some Catholics who for various reasons are a bit hostile to "the charismatic movement". And without bringing up charismatic gifts, we could all get along wonderfully and edify each other. So, it's all a bit murky. And part of that murk tells me that somehow one doesn't go around talking (or writing, or blogging) about praying in tongues. So, consider me a murk-challenger.

So, there I was, pondering my notes and in a whisper praying in tongues. Suddenly my mind made an amazing connection! My gravel in a coffee can heart essentially was seeking to land once again in that encounter with Christ, and indeed that was what I was reading about: "He does not respond to our need with an argument but with a fact. This generates a hope I could not dream. Loyalty is needed. Leave room every instance to this providence. Every day."

I realized that for me, this prayer in tongues is a way of "leaving room," of having loyalty to the fact of an encounter I have had. It is a means that makes absolutely alive again the fact of an encounter in my little dorm room on September 17, 1987. Praying in tongues is something that I can choose to do, but in the sense of being loyal to what was given to me. It is not something I can create or make up. I should probably be very ashamed of how little I use this gift once given to me. For certainly, even though I do not understand it well, God gives nothing without purpose, as my swelling and satisfied heart attested to once again this evening.

One of the things that is so weird and yet so comforting and amazing to me about CL is how great intellectual effort was made by Fr. Giussani to describe and explain and remind of these phenomena, these spiritual experiences of life in Christ. Yet, if I look honestly into my life and see these instances where these things actually happen, it is like easier than a drop coming out of a dropper, and more silent. Boop, and it is there, God is there, God came to me. All the talking about it in the world can never do it justice, but Fr. Giussani does us a great service by seeing, grasping, sharing, these essentials. And perhaps most by calling us away from other, confusing lights like moralism and dualism.

So after I finished reading through my notes I pulled out my New Testament and read through 1 Corinthians 14. Have you read it, lately? Ah, what this tells me most certainly is that I have more to ponder, and perhaps there are some conversations I need to pursue.