Reimagining the tongues of men and angels

I did not grow up in a church environment that welcomed speaking in tongues. In fact, the denomination I was raised in rejected it outright. Tongues were seen as emotionalism, foolishness, or something that belonged to other fringe expressions of Christianity that we were warned to avoid. Glossolalia had no place in my theology, my church, or my religious vocabulary. And yet, something was happening in me long before I had words to describe it.

Beginning around the age of eleven, I started to experience something that felt completely natural and completely uncontrollable at the same time. I would chant. Not sing. Not speak English. But chant — rhythmic, repetitive vocal expressions that felt ancient, familiar, and strangely comforting. I couldn’t stop myself when it began. It would rise up from somewhere deeper than thought. Not emotional hysteria, not imagination, not play-acting. It felt like something older than me moving through me.

What always puzzled me is that the sounds felt structured, intentional, and deeply meaningful, even though I did not consciously “know” what I was  . It wasn’t random noise. It had rhythm. It had cadence. It felt like language, but not a language of the mind. It was something of the body and the breath and the soul.

Years later, I learned that my father’s mother was half Chippewa. That detail landed in my spirit with far more weight than it probably should have according to the modern rational mind. I don’t claim that genetics carry spiritual memory in a simplistic way, but I also do not believe consciousness is as shallow or as mechanical as modern materialism insists. Something in me recognized that rhythm. Something in me felt at home in that sound. Whether ancestral, archetypal, or spiritual, I can’t reduce it to a neat explanation.

What is striking to me now is how closely that childhood experience aligns with what scholars later described as glossolalia. When I finally encountered Paul’s words in Corinthians — “my spirit prays, but my mind is unfruitful” — I felt seen by a text written two thousand years before I was born. I recognized myself in that sentence. I recognized the experience.

At the time, I could not have told you what glossolalia was. I wasn’t taught about it. I wasn’t encouraged toward it. In fact, I was shaped in a world suspicious of exactly that kind of thing. And yet, the experience found me anyway.

I now understand that what I was doing might not fit neatly into the category of biblical tongues as many churches define it. It may align more with what anthropology calls “ecstatic utterance,” what indigenous cultures have used as sacred chant for millennia, and what modern spirituality sometimes calls light language. I don’t feel the need to force it into one box. Spirit does not move in boxes. The divine does not respect our categories.

Indigenous chanting, especially, feels like a meaningful framework for understanding what was happening. In many native traditions, chant is not about aesthetics or performance. It is about connection. It is about entering a different layer of reality. It is about calling the unseen into presence and remembering who we are in the web of life. That feels much closer to what I experienced than the ideas I was taught in church.

I was not trying to summon anything. I was not trying to perform for God. I was not trying to impress anyone. There was no audience. It often happened alone. It was raw. It was intimate. It was unfiltered.

If there is any theology I can honestly assign to it now, it is this: it felt like my soul remembered how to breathe before my mind learned how to doubt.

There is something deeply important about pre-rational spirituality. Before doctrines, before creeds, before church splits, before religious gatekeeping — there was breath. There was rhythm. There was sound. There was vibration. The first humans did not write theology; they danced, chanted, and looked at the stars. Something about indigenous chant feels closer to that original human posture before the Mystery.

I don’t claim that what I experienced was a “native language” in a technical sense. I wasn’t speaking fluent Chippewa vocabulary. I wasn’t channeling a tribal dialect. But I do believe I was moving in a sacred pattern of sound that predates Christian and modern religious frameworks. Something older than religion and closer to Spirit.

And perhaps that is where glossolalia, indigenous chant, and what is now called light language meet — not as competing traditions, but as expressions of the same human-spiritual capacity. The ability to let sound become prayer. To let breath become bridge. To let vibration become communion.

Looking back, I see that my childhood chanting was not rebellion against my religious upbringing. It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t confusion. It was my soul’s way of speaking when the church offered me silence.

It was my spirit refusing to be flattened by doctrine.

It was the Logos finding a way to hum through flesh and breath.

I don’t feel the need to label it anymore. I don’t need to prove it was this or that. I only know that it was real. It was sacred. It was mine. And it was a gift that arrived before I had language to explain it.

Maybe that is the deepest truth of all: some forms of prayer cannot be taught, cannot be controlled, and cannot be explained. They can only be surrendered to.

And sometimes, they come to us before we even know we were searching.