September 3, 2008
Ghana Journal: PTL
When I was in my early twenties, I attended the Quaker meeting house on Second Avenue and Fifteenth Street for a number of years. One of the unusual aspects of a Quaker meeting is silence. No one is in charge in the way we think of ministers and priests leading a congregation on Sunday. Instead, everyone sits in a circle or square. The meeting begins in silence. This quiet is only interrupted when someone feels moved by the spirit to stand up and speak about God in the context of the community and the self. More than once I felt moved by the spirit to speak. As I reflect back on those times, I realize that I was less “moved by the spirit” as I was moved by the desire to be heard. I was a young writer who had not really published anything. I was desperate for someone to see me and hear my words. At some point during this period, I think I somehow understood this, if not consciously, at least in some other way, and I found myself attending less and less frequently, until not at all. I continued to write and write and try to find appropriate venues for my work, but I stopped attending Quaker meeting or any religious organization. My belief was in language, and its ability to make contact with others. In short, I was a convert to the Church of Healing Words.
My thoughts turned to this experience this past Sunday as I stood singing and clapping my hands with nearly one hundred Pentecostal Ghanaians at the Universal Central Gospel Church in Abura, a suburb of Cape Coast. The pastor’s wife was leading us in the most enthusiastic rendition of “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty” that I have ever participated in. By the end of the song, the Holy Spirit had possessed her as well as other members of the congregation. Their singing shifted surprisingly into speaking in tongues, which was carried along by the improvisation of the three piece band (electric piano, bass, and drum kit). Since this Sunday the church’s pastor was away in Nigeria attending a conference, a Deacon stepped up to the podium and gave an inspired reading from a selection of Psalms, Hebrews, First Paul, Revelations, Samuel and the Acts, not necessarily in that order. I was reminded of Jorge Luis Borges’s incantatory essay “The Library of Babel” where he posits that there is truly only one text that is continuous and forever re-sorting itself as the Deacon offered a message of salvation through intercession of others. “In your own private homes, you must be the intercessor,” he called out more than a dozen times, but more fervently and with more certainty with each additional repetition. It was as if by speaking the words, he was making his hope become real, much in the way that the beginning of the “Gospel of John” posits a similar assertion with “In the beginning was the word, and the word was God.” The act of speaking the word makes it become real, and by extension to testify, or to speak out, the gospel is the process of bringing the experience of God into the world. As the congregation’s Deacon invoked this longstanding belief, his words opened the possibility that we can bring ourselves and each other into God’s embrace. Several people truly felt that embrace as they collapse or spun into the aisles shouting in tongues.
I could feel myself being embraced and lifted by the togetherness of everyone around me. There was an extraordinary ecstasy of the Spirit that entered me through everyone else that I had never felt as an individual seeking to be moved by the spirit. The congregation joined together to bring, or perhaps initiate an eruption of, the sense of the Spirit in everyone. It was one of those generous moments where the certainty of the faith of others can swell even the most meager of souls.
I have talked in the past about the experience of listening to a sermon by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but I think I can now include a congregation of people who genuinely experience the love of Christ: if I were to remain in the presence of the certainty of their faith twenty-four-hours-a-day, three –hundred-and-sixty-five days a year, I might—just might—be able to sustain my own sense of faith. This past Sunday standing in the basement of the Universal Central Gospel Church amidst the Italian grotto motif of white marble and the electric energy of nearly one hundred true believers, I felt born again for the hour I was there. If only this feeling could have stayed with me once I stepped beyond its doors and looked up at the exposed cement columns and rusted rebar of the yet-to-be-built tabernacle above the basement. As I stumbled over construction rubble and uneven ground to the rutted dirt street, my thoughts once again turned to desolation.
