A couple of hours after my wife’s ninety-eight-year-old grandmother had a stroke earlier this month, the family gathered by her bedside in the house she’d lived in for a quarter of a century. Said grandmother, Blanche Jenson, was also my beloved godmother—someone whose comfort, home-cooked dinners, and instruction in theology had gotten me through a few exceptionally rough years. It was with her that I re-read Augustine’s Confessions, discussed in some detail each issue of First Things when it arrived, and did my best to make sense of the daunting output of her late husband, the Lutheran priest and ecumenical theologian Robert W. Jenson, especially his two-volume Systematic Theology.
So there we were, crouching next to the bed of a woman, until recently so verbally adept, who had just all but lost the power of speech. It was clear that Mimi (as my wife and I called her) could understand what we were saying, but because one side of her face was paralyzed, it was close to impossible to interpret what she was trying to tell us. And, very strong of will to the end, she definitely was trying to tell us things: about a certain photograph, for example, and about a birthday and the contents of her desk drawers.
We could understand a syllable or two here and there; my wife managed to get her to spell out a few words, laboriously, by pointing to individual letters of the alphabet on a notepad; and Mimi did manage shakily to write a sentence on the pad herself. But mostly, her speech came out as babble.
Lying on the bed with Mimi was her great-granddaughter: my five-month-old daughter. She is not articulate, though not for want of trying: She emerged from the womb strong of will. While she doesn’t yet speak “Big Girl,” which is how my wife refers to English when talking to her, she certainly does say “goo goo goo” a lot. In short, she is a babbler.
Our little babbler was a blessed answer to the prayers of an old woman who wanted nothing more in her final year than to hold and enjoy her great-granddaughter. And on that evening, as she knew her long and rich life on earth had just about run its course, there was something deeply moving, but at the same time comic, about watching the two of them—the one having lived almost 240 times as long as the other—communicate.
Shortly before we left, my daughter decided that pouring “words” onto Mimi was not enough, so she also spat up all over her. Somehow that benediction took the paralysis away for a few seconds: Mimi’s eyes twinkled, and she smiled—for the first and, as far as I know, last time. Truly, it was a benediction—Latin bene dicere (“to speak well”)—even though the speech that accompanied the spit-up was “goo.”
The best-known form of extraordinary religious speech is glossolalia: speaking in tongues. Whatever the explanation for glossolalia may be, it is assuredly different from what Mimi was doing, namely speaking her native English but physically incapable of sounding out the words normally. And it is almost certainly different, too, from what her great-granddaughter was doing: She was—and remains—on her way to speaking English but isn’t yet there. Nonetheless, I could not help but be reminded of glossolalia during their interaction, especially since some years earlier, Mimi and I had had a long talk over drinks and dinner about the phenomenon.
Neither Mimi nor Poppi (which is what my wife called her grandfather, whom I never met) was a Pentecostalist or a charismatic Christian. (Well, she had plenty of charisma, as, I gather, did he—but in a different sense.) Still, they took glossolalia seriously from a theological standpoint, and I am interested in it myself because of my two main areas of professional competence: linguistics and classics. After all, the foundational texts for Christian glossolalia are written in New Testament Greek (Acts, 1 Corinthians, maybe Mark), and it is obviously a basic question whether glossolalia counts as language.
It is perhaps not surprising that what was until recently the best study of glossolalia remains one that combines linguistic and theological expertise: William J. Samarin’s 1972 book Tongues of Men and Angels. However, Samarin was probably wrong to believe that glossolalia represents speakers’ “regression” to their earliest linguistic attempts at language, such as my daughter’s gooing. Perhaps speaking in tongues is not something with which linguists should be concerned, but there are evident reasons for anthropologists to take interest, and Nicholas Harkness has devoted an excellent recent book, Glossolalia and the Problem of Language (2021), to understanding “the significance of [the phenomenon’s] linguisticality for practitioners,” especially in South Korea.
About the religious significance of glossolalia I am in no position to opine. But I like to imagine that Mimi, who died some forty hours after her great-granddaughter’s benediction, is now discussing the matter with Poppi over heavenly drinks and dinner as they watch over the development, linguistic and otherwise, of my cooing, gooing daughter.
Joshua T. Katz is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Image by Alvesgaspar via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
