I’m Not a Christian Anymore, but I Still Speak in Tongues
By: Chelsea London
Tags: Spiritual Experience, Religion, Spirituality, This Happened To Me, Mysticism

My First Experience

I was on my way home from quitting a part-time job I hated. Sitting on the train heading back to my University, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders and began to sense unintelligible utterances that wanted to come out welling up inside me. A familiar aura accompanied the feeling. I had experienced it once before while I was laying in bed late at night after a day teaching English at a school in Italy.

It was a full immersion English camp, so I didn’t speak Italian, and the students and family I lived with didn’t speak much English. I had a lot of time in my thoughts. I was a Christian at the time, so laying in bed, unable to sleep that night, I began to pray. Suddenly, the energy in the room started to shift. I looked at the closed door and had the nearest happening to a vision I’ve ever experienced as I vividly saw smoke in my mind’s eye, coming through the crack under the door. I intuitively trusted this haze and felt it as a presence entering the room. It enveloped me, and I began to cry as I felt the sensation of my body simultaneously lifting off the bed and weight similar to an LSD trip. I began to speak the words, “It’s you” over and over again through my tears.

The experience lasted less than five minutes, and the next morning I woke up with an unexplainable peace that I could almost taste and smell. It was this same tangible serenity I felt on the train that day after I quit my job, so I trusted a spiritual experience was about to unfold. I got off at my stop and allowed the utterances in my heart to manifest. It was a peculiar feeling, and throughout my twenty-minute walk home, the language grew in intensity to the point where I no longer felt I was controlling it. I was walking down the street, speaking gibberish and welcoming the highest high I’ve ever felt. The “speaking in tongues” eventually subsided and I sat on my bed stunned and perplexed by what had just occurred.

Becoming More Open To Spiritual Encounters

Both of these experiences weren’t normal for me. I grew up in a cessationist Christian culture where we believed that the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased after the early Christians built the Church and used miracles to spread the gospel. These miracles were no longer needed. I was therefore distrustful of Christians who spoke in tongues or embraced other aspects of Charismatic Christianity, so to experience it for myself was quite a trip.

Once I opened myself up to the Charismatic experience, I began to experience other phenomenons, such as “holy laughter” (laughing uncontrollably in ecstasy), “the jerks” (pleasurable, involuntary jolts of the body) and “falling in the Spirit”, which you may have seen on TV when people fall prostrate, perhaps after a minister touches their forehead.

I left the Church almost seven years ago, but I still speak in tongues and occasionally experience “the jerks”. I would now classify myself as a spiritual agnostic theist, meaning I do still believe in some form of God, but I don’t accept that I can know God exists with absolute certainty. I add the “spiritual” label because it’s a step further than believing in something bigger than myself; I actively attempt to connect with that Being. I have found value in continuing to nurture my spiritual self through various customs, including yoga, meditation, scripture, non-dualistic thinking, Sufism, and the rich mystic tradition of the Church. My spirit is also edified by continuing the practice of speaking in tongues.

What Is Speaking in Tongues?

Also referred to as glossolalia, speaking in tongues means different things to different people. It is essentially a language unknown to the person saying it, either believed to be a natural language used somewhere in the world, a heavenly language for personal spiritual edification or a message from God to the congregation, which then needs to be translated by someone with the spiritual gift of translation. Theologists would classify my experience under personal edification.

Glossolalia originates at least as early as the New Testament and has marked various movements in the Christian tradition, most recently the Charismatic movement of both Protestant and Catholic Churches beginning in the 1960s. This movement was born out of Pentecostalism, the beginning of which was the Azusa Street Revival in the first decade of 20th century Los Angeles.

As mentioned, some Christians don’t believe the gift of speaking in tongues exists anymore; some believe everyone has the ability after “baptism in the Spirit”, and others believe only part of the congregation receives it. There are also various expressions of it, including “singing in the Spirit”, which is tongues in melody form — another method I use.

People who speak in tongues describe the experience in different ways: peaceful, euphoric, loving, emotional, transcendent, exhilarating, cathartic. Spontaneous tongues are characterized by “an intense uprush of vocalizations that is a product of a religious altered state.” In contrast, context-dependent glossolalia “originates as an idea about glossolalia in the speaker’s mind.” The first time I spoke in tongues, it was a spontaneous experience. I have had similar experiences since, but mostly it is more similar to “context-dependent” glossolalia which leads to spontaneous tongues. In other words, I consciously begin speaking in tongues and somewhere in the middle of the session, I no longer feel I am controlling the phrases. I also start to feel the positive feelings associated with speaking in tongues.

It’s also worth noting that I am mainly speaking to the Christian tradition of speaking in tongues and that glossolalia is not exclusive to Christianity.

What Does the Research Say?

A series of new studies commenced after the start of the Charismatic movement of the 1960s.

Linguistics

Linguists agree that speaking in tongues is not language as we know it. William J. Samarin who conducted a five-year cross-cultural study in the 70s describes it as “meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead. [It] consists of strings of syllables, made up of sounds taken from all those that the speaker knows, put together more or less haphazardly but emerging nevertheless as word-like and sentence-like units because of realistic, language-like rhythm and melody.” Anthropologist and linguist Felicitas Goodman discovered that there are also similarities in tongues regardless of culture or time.

Psychology

Glossolalia is not considered to be a sign of mental illness. In fact, a recent study on almost 1,000 clergy members in the UK found those who spoke in tongues to be more emotionally stable than those who did not. Researchers have theorized that those who are susceptible to therapeutic hypnosis may share similarities in dopamine activity with people who have a propensity for glossolalia, but this is still to be studied.

Neuroscience

There have been instances of temporal lobe transients (a sort of pleasurable, electrical micro seizure in the brain) showing up on EEGs during a prolonged session of speaking in tongues.

A study in 2006 got the attention of the New York Times when it found that the frontal lobe of subjects engaging in glossolalia was relatively quiet (a key difference between meditation and speaking in tongues). The frontal lobe is responsible for voluntary movement, language expression and executive control over what you say and do. Lead researcher Andrew Newberg adds,

“The scans also showed a dip in the activity of a region called the left caudate, the area involved in motor and emotional control, so it may be that practitioners, while mindful of their circumstances, nonetheless cede some control over their bodies and emotions.”

This echoed my experience of feeling I wasn’t always in control of the words coming out of my mouth while speaking in tongues. Newberg says,

“It seems to be something that someone can ready themselves to do, but once they are fully into it, they experience being ‘taken over’ by it. The people we studied certainly were not in their usual state of consciousness and required some effort to stop them from the practice. They also seemed to require several minutes before ‘coming back’ to their usual state.”

Another recent study on Pentecostals showed a decrease in cortisol (the stress hormone) and an increase in α-amylase activity. Christopher Dana Lynn of the research team says,

“I predicted people with more glossolalia experience would have lower cortisol, which they generally did. Amylase is a little more difficult to interpret, but the higher rate of amylase among those with more glossolalia experience is interpreted as greater stability.”

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure what speaking in tongues is or what it means, but the spiritual edification I receive along with the pleasurable sensations and reduction in stress is enough to convince me that it is still of value to my life. It sits on my shelf of spiritual tools I reach for when I connect to something bigger than myself; a vehicle that assists me in becoming more loving, present and free.