麻豆社

In a wide ranging interview published yesterday on the Premier Christian Radio website, the Archbishop of Canterbury described his morning prayer routine as including praying in tongues. 鈥淣ot as an occasional thing鈥� he explained 鈥渂ut a part of daily prayer.鈥� To those unfamiliar with this spiritual practise it might seem a little strange. To pray or speak in tongues is to vocalise speech-like utterances that do not have any known grammatical structure, but are believed to offer a more emotionally direct access to God. Some claim tongues are a kind of divine language that are given as a gift to the speaker. Others look down on speaking in tongues as being on the worryingly irrational end of the religious spectrum.

I have never prayed like this myself, as it happens. The nearest I have come to it is the way I have spoken to my children when they were babies. Usually alone, I chat to them in a language comprised of soothing hums and peculiar popping noises. And yes, I use the description 鈥渓anguage鈥� here very much in inverted commas. Nonetheless, it is a form of communication, and a communication of love. And though I would probably be a little embarrassed to do this sort of thing in public 鈥� I鈥檓 English after all - it remains for me a precious form of private communication, articulating something extremely deep about my love for my children. And I can see how something similar may be extended to the divine.

More philosophically, also find the presumption that there is something inherently foolish about irrationality quite misplaced. For what, I wonder, is so wrong with the irrational? After all, according to a number of psychologists, we are driven far more by irrational forces than we are by rational ones. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that human behaviour should be understood a being like a tiny analytic and rational rider sitting on and trying to steer a large and irrational elephant. Many a political campaign fails, he argues, because it works on the assumption that human beings are rational information processors. 鈥淚 think therefore I am鈥� said Descartes, defining human life narrowly in terms of its cool, rational side. But 鈥渋f you want to change someone鈥檚 mind about a moral or political issue,鈥� says Haidt 鈥渢alk to the elephant first鈥�.

Perhaps then, speaking in tongues is a bit like bringing this whole elephant-sized dimension of human life, this vast non-rational hinterland, into a (quote, unquote) 鈥渃onversation鈥� with the divine. From the Dionysian cult of the ancient Greeks, to the ecstatic dancing of Sufi Muslims and Hasidic Jews, to the spirit-filled utterances of evangelical Christians, an exuberant articulation of the irrational keeps us alive to the deeper equations that motivate and sustain us. In other words, the irrational refreshes the parts that more formal prayer cannot always reach.

Show less