When I Spoke in Tongues: by Jessica Wilbanks
A memoir.
A story of faith and its loss.
From the cover:
Jessica Wilbanks grew up in poverty in the backwoods of southern Maryland, where the Pentecostal church was the core of her family's life. As they struggled to make ends meet, moving from one rental house to another, their faith was their anchor. They worshipped a God who lifted up the poor and downhearted and endowed them with miraculous powers, who unleashed earthquakes and hurricanes to show his displeasure, who rewarded the faithful with long lives, good health, and great riches.
As a teenager, driven by a desire to discover the world beyond the close-knit confines of family and church, Jessica walked away, trading her faith for freedom and driving a wedge between her and her deeply religious family. Years later, struggling with guilt and shame and missing the God of her youth, Jessica began a quest to learn more about her childhood faith.
When I Spoke in Tongues is a story of the painful and complicated process of losing one's faith, moving across class divides, and learning to look within oneself for strength and meaning. In the end, it's a story of how a family splintered by dogmatic faith can eventually be knit together again through love.
Why should you read this book?
When I Spoke in Tongues is about the struggle of balancing the faith we’re born into with the world we grow to find. There’s an often an inner struggle between those two worlds. Anyone who’s been there before understands it. This book and Jessica’s story can help us see the dangers of fundamentalistic beliefs and how they impact our perceptions of the world and of ourselves. But Jessica also shows us that faith is on a spectrum. It’s complex and diverse. And regardless of our beliefs, we can still share the world together, through empathy and love.
Excerpts:
“..I fell in with a group of activists who congregated a few tables over… a white woman with tiny, perfect dreadlocks invited me to a meeting in a church basement a few blocks over on Columbia Road. She said they were banding together to fight poverty, homelessness, and inequality, and that sounded good to me.
Of the thirty of us who ended up in that church basement a few nights later, half were religious and the other half were practically minded agnostics who put up with the crucifixes and stained glass because the churches had the meeting space and staff to drive the work forward…
As the minister’s prayer rolled to a close I clasped the bony fingers of the white-woman next to me and thought about dinner. But just then a small female voice cut through the minister’s baritone. When he paused, that voice became louder and more fervent. I opened my eyes and recognized a Nigerian woman named Beatrice who I had seen at various food drives and fundraisers…
When Beatrice settled into the grooves of her prayer, she shook her head back and forth in what could have either been praise or fury. Jehovah! Blessed Jesus! Savior-Lord! King of Kings! … She cried out to God again, calling him Father. She told God she loved him, she told Jesus she loved him, and she told the Holy Ghost she loved him…
Many of the other people in that room called themselves Christians, but they did not believe—as Beatrice did—that the Holy Ghost was a physical presence that could be summoned down from heaven by praying that at a great volume. They didn’t think of evil as a dark, smoky spirit that could sneak into a person when they turned their back to God, or that bad spirits could be battered out of a person with shouts and oils and fervent prayers…
But the God that Beatrice prayed to had been my God once. He was the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. He was a God known for meddling in the world, rolling his sleeves up and plunging in wrists-deep, unleashing earthquakes and hurricanes to show his displeasure and rewarding his followers with long lives, health, and great riches…They also believed in the baptism of the Holy Spirit, in which the Holy Spirit burrowed itself into believers, leaving a trail of signs and wonders in its path, turning them into new creatures, releasing them from heathen habits not through their own will, but rather through grace. The outward sign of this state was the gift of tongues—the divinely inspired infusion of a special prayer language that may or may not have a semblance to the languages of this world. I used to speak that language. But that was a long time ago.”
“The little I knew about sex came from the thick letters my parents received every week…Every week the letters related another travesty—teenage pregnancy, child molesters, gay teachers trying to convert our youth. From those letters I knew that when two married people had sex, it was fine because the Lord wanted there to be more children in the world. But when sex went wrong—outside of marriage, in unnatural configurations, there was nothing the Lord hated more. I did my best to toe the line. The rare times that I dared to imagine the carnal act, I made sure to imagine a wedding first, so that it wasn’t too sinful. When I pulled on my pajamas and found my mind drifting over to a wiry, brown-eyed boy in my youth group, I counted sheep to put those thoughts out of my mind. When he tracked me down in the parking lot one Sunday after church and asked me to be his girlfriend, I shook my head no and didn’t dare to look up as he slunk away. I felt a dull thumping in my chest and knew this was sin, making itself alive and known to me. The entire next day, I stayed in bed with a feverish feeling. Whenever I thought of his hand in mine, guilt bubbled from the pit of my belly.”
“…that’s when she asked if I was a Christian.
Never before in my life had I answered that question honestly…But this time, I told the truth. I carefully considered the question, looked Ruth in the eye, and told her no. I wasn’t a Christian anymore.
I had nothing against Jesus. I actually admired him—he was radical in every way, turning over the money changers’ tables, breaking one rule after another, speaking in strange stories and parables. If I had lived in the same time as he did, I might have given away all of my things and followed him.”
About the Author
Jessica Wilbanks is the author of When I Spoke in Tongues. She has received a Pushcart Prize as well as creative nonfiction awards from Ninth Letter, Sycamore Review, Redivider, and Ruminate magazine. Her essays have received Notable Mentions in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she was selected as a finalist for the PEN Annual Literary Award in Journalism. Jessica received her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Houston.