What is the Gift of Tongues?
It is the expression of praise to God by oral formation of non-intelligible sounds. It is a language of love that springs from the heart and bypasses the intellect. It resembles baby talk as non-cognitive expression; or humming a tune; or crying out incoherently in great suffering. It expresses love non-verbally like a contemplative glance, a hug, a touch, a kiss.
It is a gift of the Holy Spirit as it is a mediation between us and God. It is a movement of love within the soul that manifests orally.
An Ordinary, Volitional, Human Act
The agent is the self. It resembles blessing yourself with holy water on entering a Church; or genuflecting to the tabernacle; or praying the rosary; or singing a hymn. The motivation is spiritual or supernatural, a movement to God, but it is human and ordinary.
Bypassing of the Intellect
So it is especially liberational for the intellectual and educated, who exercise control through cognition and verbalization. It is surrender of the intellect and of control into a humble form of ecstatic love. The will temporarily ignores the intellect, granting it a rest, and surrenders to a song of trust, love, adoration.
Liberational, Anti-Bourgeois
Socially perceived as infantile, aberrant, and transgressive, it is also a liberation from social expectations and pressures into a new liminal zone of freedom to engage lovingly with God and a worshipping Church. It is a release from bourgeois normality and mimetic monotony. And it is enriching of forms of Catholicism, Irish and northern European, diminished in their emotional repression by influences from American Calvinism and earlier Jansenism.
Childlike and Mature
It is a deliberate, mature, wholesome exercise in evangelical childlikeness: trust in God, union with the worshipping community, expressive love and adoration.
Praise
It can be communal or private prayer. It is always simply praise. This is what makes it so special. Praise is the most difficult kind of prayer. Petition, intercession, thanksgiving and contrition are all easy and obvious even to a 4-year old. Meditation requires some training and practice. But praise is impossible without a clear encounter with the holiness of God. One cannot enter praise/worship/adoration through mere instruction, imitation, or an act of the will. Praise, as in tongues, flows our of engagement with God. Outside of that it is ridiculous and incoherent. Other responses of worship can be: silence, prostration, tears, contrition, resting in the Spirit, song, dance, and other.
Mimetic and Solitary
It is largely a memetic phenomenon, learned in community by imitation. However there are often reports of those who erupt, out of the ecstasy of prayer in solitude, into tongues spontaneously, organically, almost without deliberation and free of mimetic influence. This suggests that it is more than a learned, social behavior, but a movement of the Holy Spirit.
Receptivity to Revelation
In privacy and community, tongues prepares an atmosphere of serenity and receptivity to a prophetic Word from God.
Counsel in Chaos and Stress
In solitude, I find tongues marvelously helpful in stressful situations wherein a decision is required, the right course is not evident, and the options available all arouse anxiety. What I do is mentally detach, focus my intellect on the powerful, providential presence of God in the Holy Spirit, and quietly (with lips closed) form the sounds of praise. My attention is now in praise of God and the physical movement of my tongue apparatus keeps me in that posture, even as it is not manifest to those around. Psychologically my anxiety diminishes as I rest in praise. My heart/emotions return to serenity and safety, allowing my cognitive functions to reach clarity and full agency. Within a very short time, a positive and promising path ahead presents itself, without effort or stress. It is a natural, normal psychological/emotional/intellectual process, but under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
Glossolalia
"Glossolalia" can refer to the phenomenon in which listeners hear and understand the sounds voiced in their own language. This is, of course, reported at Pentecost itself when visitors from many nations understood the proclamations of the apostles. It is also reported sporadically and randomly. Historical evidence for this is very slight. If real it is rare. It cannot be ruled out but is an exceptional thing.
Is Tongues Normal or Necessary for Spirit-filled, Pentecostal Living?
It has historically been so rare that we could hardly consider it normal or necessary for Catholic life.
A better question would be: Is it a genuine gift from God? If so, we do well to seek it, encourage it, nourish it, and pray for it.
Yes, it clearly is a gift from God. How could a expression of praise not be? It's prevalence in the early Church, in the lives of many saints (however randomly), and across the globe over the last 125 years make this evident.
It clearly is not extrinsic, accidental, or irrelevant to Catholic life.
Let's make an analogy to the human body. We cannot live without heart, lungs, brain, skeleton and such. Within the body of Christ we have Eucharist, Baptism and the sacraments; Word of God; the hierarchy; our Mother Mary and the communion of saints; and such. However the full, thriving human body has legs, feet, toes, hands, fingers, ear lobes, nose, tongue, and such. Any of these could be removed and the body could survive, but with diminished capacities.
And so, the Body of Christ, the Church, lives robustly in a multitude of activities, organs, practices, beliefs and traditions which flow out of and into the primary organs: devotions, litanies, pilgrimages, retreats, rosaries, stations of the cross, lives/teachings of saints, renewal movements, religious orders, theologies, and so many others. And so, we might just add to this list the charismatic gifts: healing prayer, deliverance from demons, prophesy, discernment of spirits, inspired reading of scriptures, and (last and arguably the least) tongues. We might compare it to the smallest toe: it has a key role, however modest.
No single person or even concrete community can practice all these things. But the overall Body of Christ would be diminished without tongues, hermits, stigmatists, levitation and everything else.
Conclusion
We are, all of us, small, finite, limited, flawed creatures. No one of us can receive all the gifts God gives his Church. But we do not want to prematurely limit ourselves. We want to dilate our hearts, intellects, wills, emotions to receive all the specific gifts God has for us.
With the Holy Spirit, there is always MORE!
Let us expand our expectations, joyfully!
Come Holy Spirit!
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