Walking in the spirit

Erica has a post up today about growing up Pentecostal.  An excerpt:

It has never been cool to be Pentecostal.  I don’t mean not cool in that i’m ok and so are you, it’s cool sense;  but in the traditional  –cool: adj. hip,  rendering one the service of gaining cultural credibility and approval– sense. Pentecostalism has yet to be the flavor of any month (in the contiguous United States that is).  Being pentecostal gets one the opposite of credibility…So I am going to own up to my own spiritual history –  I am so Pentecostal you can’t imagine it.  And what you are imagining, those people on that channel, is so far away from what I am talking about that I don’t want you to try. 

I had a brief but intense flirtation with Pentecostalism several years ago that has left an enduring mark upon me.  I know that regular readers of this blog must be wondering what avenue Hugo hasn’t walked down!  I’ll admit, my spiritual autobiography is very "Los Angeles" in its tremendous diversity and, I confess, in its flexibility and superficiality. 

When I rededicated my life to Christ in 1998, I began by going to the Episcopal Church, which had been familiar to me since my childhood.  Though my parents were not believers, the few church-going people we knew well were all Episcopalians, and my mother had always said it was a "reasonable" church.  She had not been happy when I was baptized and confirmed as a Roman Catholic in college.  (I took the confirmation name "Thomas", for the Doubter as well as for saints More, Becket, and Aquinas.)  When I left Holy Mother Church in the aftermath of my first divorce, many in my family were relieved.

When I came back to Christ, I found that while I loved the liturgy and the politics at All Saints, I was hungry for something more intense, something more passionate, something more certain.  I knew I wasn’t going back to Rome.  (With multiple divorces on my track record, that thought was out of the question.)  And evangelicalism, particularly Pentecostalism, scared the hell out of me. All I knew about Pentecostals was what I had seen on television, and I knew darned well that these were "not our kind of people."   My snobbery and my fear kept me away from the intensely personal worship that my spirit craved.

What changed me was, of all things, a Jennifer Knapp record.  In 1999, she had appeared on the Lilith Fair tour — the only Christian artist to do so.  In early 2000, browsing on Amazon, I came across her debut CD "Kansas", and bought it on impulse.  I was 32, almost 33, and far too old to be so impacted by a popular music recording by a gal considerably younger than I.  But I ended up listening to that CD daily for a month, often crying while doing so. (In time, I bought her other CDs and still treasure them all).  I loved how nakedly personal her music was, how present Jesus seemed to her, and in her lyrics I found what I was missing in the Episcopal Church.

At the same time, I was seeing a woman at Fuller Seminary who had come out of the Assemblies of God tradition (AG is, I think, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world.)  In her younger days, she had been a campus minister with AG’s college branch, Chi Alpha.  I’m very good about not blogging about my past relationships, but I will say that this one pushed me to do what I would otherwise surely never have done: explore a branch of the body of Christ that I would never otherwise have explored.

My most intense experiences with Pentecostalism came, of all places, in Italy.  I spent the fall semester 2000 teaching in Florence. For three and a half months, I lived in a little flat by myself.  I didn’t speak much Italian (I was teaching American students in English), and felt quite isolated.  I ended up joining a small English-speaking group of students from across Europe and America who met a couple of times a week in a church basement.   Though a couple of the Americans came out of the Reformed tradition (including one remarkable gal whose father was a major leader in the very conservative Orthodox Presbyterian Church), most were charismatics.  And the worship we had in those months was like nothing else I’ve ever, ever known.  I heard tongues for the first time, which sounded nothing like what I had expected.  I felt and experienced things I simply cannot put into words.  The closest I can come is to say that it was only in charismatic worship that I have ever felt that Jesus was literally right there in the room with me. Miracles would happen, healing would take place, and it would all happen NOW.  The Catholics and the Anglicans taught me to pray to God; the Pentecostals taught me that God could literally overwhelm me and consume me and leave me sweating and crying and laughing all at once. 

If I hadn’t been so far from home, I don’t know that I would have taken the risk to so completely abandon everything I had ever been taught.  I still regard those months in Italy as a spiritual watershed in my life, because it was only then, at the age of 33, that I first felt what it was like to be totally immersed in Jesus.  I worshiped a bit around the edges of some Pentecostal communities when I came back from Florence, even as I grew more active at All Saints.  I went to the occasional Calvary Chapel service, and hung out with AG folks for a while. I even spent some time with the gay Pentecostals at Christ Chapel of the Valley — and let me assure you that that that is one spirit-filled community!

During my two-year sojourn with the Mennonites, I worshiped with a number of folks who had come out of the charismatic/Pentecostal tradition.  Though Pasadena Mennonite Church was decidedly NOT a place where the "gifts of the spirit" were publicly manifest, there were plenty of hands in the air during worship.  It was a nice reminder of what it was that I had known for a brief but intense period of my life.

Today, when I am hanging out with liberal Episcopalians, I hear many a slur directed towards Pentecostals.   Jokes about Jimmy Swaggart, and complaints about how charismatics skew American impressions of Christianity are common.  Most of these remarks are really class-based; most Episcopalians assume (with a small degree of accuracy) that Pentecostals are less well-educated, less affluent, and less culturally sophisticated than those who attend All Saints Pasadena.  As gently as I can, I try to speak up when my friends at All Saints misrepresent or ridicule the intense faith of their brothers and sisters in Christ.   (My often passionate defense of charismatic conservatives tends to surprise a lot of my fellow Episcopalians.)

My past, my present, and my politics kept me from staying a Pentecostal — but dear God in heaven, I am grateful for what I learned when I walked and prayed with those who knew Jesus on such intimate terms.