Word: glossolalia
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such spiritual gifts as the ability to "prophesy" (not predicting events, but uttering spiritual messages from God), the power to heal, and, perhaps most controversial of all, the ability to speak in "tongues," known technically as glossolalia. The weird sounds of glossolalia, a primitive kind of communication, either spoken or sung and without any apparent meaning, disturb Christians outside the movement. Among Charismatics, though, glossolalia has two functions-private devotion and public prayer or prophecy...
...Cross, St. Teresa of Avila and Sören Kierkegaard. Many mainstream Protestants and Catholics, while staying mostly within their churches, are caught up in the rapidly expanding Pentecostal movement. The Pentecostalists seek to renew their belief through an ecstatic personal encounter with the Holy Spirit, manifested especially in glossolalia, the speaking of mysterious tongues. These neo-Pentecostalists tend to be more subdued than the "classic" Protestant Pentecostalists whose churches date back to spiritual revivals that began toward the close of the past century. But even as churchgoing members of mainstream denominations, the new Pentecostalists keep their special spiritual exercises...
...Catholic Church had good and rational reasons for adopting a vernacular Mass, a popularly intelligible and flexible service far more accessible than the rumbling, mysterious Latin that sometimes seemed more like glossolalia on the lips of a hurried priest. But many traditionalists who understood the Latin Mass regarded its translation as equivalent to redesigning Chartres or Notre Dame along the lines of a functional Manhattan office building. The Latin version, with a patina of centuries, had a majestic ritual quality that the vernacular often turns into a godforsaken flatness...
Despite the evidence of enriched religiosity, there is enough in the Catholic Pentecostalist movement to account for the hierarchy's reserve. It is casually ecumenical. Its speaking in tongues ?glossolalia, a form of prayer that is usually a babbling non-language?is done quietly, but it is done. The Pentecostals have the unhappy faculty of offending both liberals and conservatives in Catholicism: liberals resent their insistent orthodox theology, conservatives their communal lifestyle...
What Barth is really up to can perhaps best be seen-or rather heard-in Glossolalia. He uses the mystical notion of speaking in tongues as a pointed metaphor in his guerrilla war against static literary forms. More a soothsayer's scripture than prose fiction, the piece mimics the ancient ritual that attempts to divine the truth with spontaneous word patterns and nonsense syllables. Concludes Barth: "The sense-lessest babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message, or prayer...