The Spirit

In our church, worshippers fellon their faces before the altar,making noises with their mouthsthat, to them, must have soundedlike the language of angels.Shouting out wordlessly, signifying holiness.Even when I believed,I thought it was mostly gibberish.But I still like the pluralityof the phrase speaking in tonguesbecause it suggests a communicationthat can only be achievedif the speaker has stolen another person's tongue,or has been possessedby a foreign appendage. People can be possessedby demons, but more oftenthey are possessed by people they knew, or by places.More often they are possessed by themselves.The woman, after eating quietlyin the restaurant, seeminglyno different from any of us, stood up from her tableand took off her clothes, piece by piece,each garment like a newspaper pageshe had finished reading, and had no need for.And when she was completely, fundamentally naked,she sat back down at the tableand continued eating. As if nothing had happened.There is, in religion, often the expression of a desire to be filled with something alien,something beyond rationality and control.When the police arrived at the restaurantto escort the woman back to the hospitalfrom which she'd been released three days earlier,one of the officers draped a blanketaround her bare shoulders.This is what the ushers didin my church, when someone was filledwith the spirit. They covered them,as if they were naked.