jabel

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:45:19 -0400

I was never good at being young but I’m going to be great at being old.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:40:05 -0400

It’s strange how a competent biography that attempts to explain someone’s motivations and context can make them more sympathetic. Because, y’all, if Ann Lee was operating today, not one of us would think she’s worth listening to. Not that anyone is holding her up as a model, but you know what I mean

As the Spirit gave them utterance

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:49:16 -0400

In 1773, Ann Lee and other Shakers were arrested for causing a disturbance during a service at Christ Church in Manchester. Afterwards she was questioned by ministers.

Richard Francis, Ann the Word:

Once when recounting the tale of this religious interrogation, Ann said she spoke for four hours and the ministers - the ‘greatest in those parts’ (suddenly we hear the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith talking) - ‘said that I spoke in seventy two different tongues, and that I spoke them more perfect than any in their knowledge were able to do. After this they tried to persuade me to teach the languages; but I did not regard their flatteries.’

These priests, ‘great’ or not, seem to have been rather more naive than was Timothy Dwight, President of Yale, when he went to visit the Shaker community in New Lebanon in upstate New York more than a quarter of a century later, in 1799. He heard a woman speaking in tongues and pointed out to her that she was making sounds that were not articulated, and which therefore could not be called words. She replied, ‘How dost thee know but that we speak the Hotmatot language? The language of the Hotmatots is said to be made up of such words.’ Dwight suggested that it would be simple enough to do a test if instead of speaking Hottentot they essayed a more familiar language, like Greek, Latin or French, but the woman wisely declined. An eccentric commentator called Thomas Brown, who was fascinated by Shakerism and who joined the sect for a while, described, indeed transcribed, his own experience of speaking in tongues at about the same time as the woman who spoke to Dwight: ‘Hiero devojirankemango, adgileabono, durem subramo, devir-anto diacerimango, Jaffa vah pe cu evangalio; de vom grom seb crinom, as vare cremo domo’, the commas adding a nicely fussy touch. Brown makes a shrewd point about the serendipity involved: ‘When a person runs on in this manner of speaking for any length of time. I … thought it probable that he would strike into different languages, and give some words in each their right pronunciation.’ In other words, this apparent gibberish is an oral equivalent of the eternal monkey at the typewriter.

The snideness of the writer annoys me so, hey ho, let’s get into it.

I spoke in tongues many times as a teenager and young adult. I’m in the somewhat odd position of believing the experience was genuine in some sense of the word while being in zero danger of becoming a Pentecostal again. I do find it strange to talk about my experience directly but, if I don’t, the only discussion of speaking in tongues you’re likely to hear is from Pentecostals themselves, social scientists, or skeptics.

It’s worth noting that the Holiness people were insistent that tongues were not taught. Holiness people regarded as blasphemers the “modern” Pentecostals and Charismatics who practiced a sort of “fleshly” babbling with the hopes that the Holy Ghost would take over—or even worse, tried to “learn” how to speak in tongues. True speaking in tongues was only ever ecstatic.

I can tell you firsthand that it happened, and not rarely. It was my experience (and I can only speak of my experience) that the moment my rational mind kicked in, the experience stopped, like shutting off a tap. The experience was essentially trance-like.

Speaking in tongues was considered the evidence of the baptism of the Holy Ghost, which was a pivotal and highly sought after experience of Holiness people. People would pray for days and weeks for “the baptism”. It was a fixture of youth camps, since the baptism was an experience considered essential for staying true to the faith—a perennial problem for young people. Consequently, there developed a set of practices that set the right conditions for the experience. Not a formula (God forbid). A method, not unlike trance practices around the world.

Pray out loud
Kneeling or standing
With your head up
And your arms raised.
Praise God incessantly
With an open heart
And the Holy Ghost will take over your tongue.

This initial experience was generally a matter of time and persistence. Rarely did it come quickly. Almost every Holiness person has had the experience of gathering around a seeker and praying with them, encouraging them, for hours on end. I went to a lot of youth camps as a teenager, so I put in my time too.

Once a person received the baptism of the Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues became a somewhat common experience. Any time the Holy Ghost “moved” in a service, people would start dancing, running, jumping, and speaking in tongues. This didn’t happen every service, but if it didn’t happen every few services, a church might get the reputation for being dead.

Even to us at the time, there were a few people whose speaking in tongues sounded suspiciously like simple tongue trilling or babble. We suspected they might be acting in “the flesh”. “Try the spirits, whether they be of God.”

Sometimes, though, a message in tongues would strike like a lightning bolt in a service, with an interpretation in English following. The church, suddenly addressed directly by God. Those could be electrifying moments.

I never thought I was speaking in a known human language. If you would have pressed me, I would have said I was speaking in a “heavenly” language. In my recollection, though, it wasn’t ever an issue. We heard stories of Acts 2-like experiences where missionaries would speak to a foreign audience in their own native language but that would have been considered extremely rare.

I propose a rule: Never believe an experiencer’s explanation of their extraordinary experience. Remember the response of the dancer when asked what her performance meant? “If I could tell you, I wouldn’t have needed to dance it.” Explanations break the experience, because anything extraordinary is beyond words.

Mother Ann and the Shaker sister in Lebanon speculating about the languages they were speaking is a sort of code switching. They are attempting to explain the non-rational in rational terms, which always fails. And it exposes the experience to asinine commentary by biographers and Yale presidents.

Religious experience, including but not limited to ecstasy, is best left underexplained. It is sufficient for me to understand my experience as an example of a universal, if strange, experience. I look back on my experience with curiosity and gratitude. It was real, not fake, even though I no longer understand it the way I did then. I don’t expect to ever have that experience again. Religious ecstasy, though—that’s something I’ve never stopped pursuing.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 06:58:19 -0400

You could read today’s Cory Doctorow column or you could watch this Nathan MacIntosh bit. 😉

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:32:53 -0400

Another good thing today: it’s Wendell Berry’s 92nd birthday. Happy birthday, uncle Wendell!

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:11:59 -0400

First day of school around here. It’s nice to see the buzz of activity again. Kids walking in their first day of school outfits. Big yellow buses rolling around town. I love these cycles of life. Even the neighborhood cat Ralph was enjoying it as she sat with some kids waiting for their bus.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:29:55 -0400

Also, about that last post, could you monotheists please let the rank and file know this is a complicated question, please? Most of the Christians where I live think anything that isn’t fundamentalist Christianity is straight up demons. If we’re going to start encouraging a more enchanted world, then we also need to figure out how to avoid turning it into “Witch Trials 2, Now With Surveillance”.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:10:31 -0400

I appreciate the nuance in “Christianity and the problem of the gods”. These issues are why I don’t find monotheism compelling. Even the most generous monotheism ends up twisting itself into knots. For me, John Michael Greer’s book A World Full of Gods is not only persuasive but somehow more natural

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:10:57 -0400

Been feeling flat for the last few days and realized the reason this morning: I’ve been an inside cat too long. Heat and busyness have kept me inside for weeks, so I and my walking stick headed to Murray Woods this afternoon. Just what I needed.

One year ago today

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:59:55 -0400

I left my old job one year ago today. Me, walking out the door:

I started my new job five days later. I seriously underestimated the difficulty of transitioning from a job in which I was an expert to a job where I knew exactly nothing. My confidence was shattered there for a while. But a year later, I know more than nothing and my confidence has picked itself up from the floor and found the elevator button.

Apart from that long experience of shakiness, it has been good, good, good. I enjoy the work and my co-workers are solid folks. The environment and pace of work is humane; busy, of course, but uninfected by “hustle culture.”

I have had cause a million times over the past year to thank the powers of my life that Rachel and I took the opportunity when it presented itself. One example: it would have been overwhelming (perhaps breaking?) to have gone through the experience of Mom’s sudden worsening and the experience of living with her for two weeks while still working at the old job. Seriously. It would have been bad.

While a “return to work” rule change was the nominal reason for my departure, it became clear to me that was only the presenting cause which revealed a deeper sickness. The speed and way in which I got the new job was clear evidence to Rachel and me that the spirits were at work in our lives. It will go down as one of the most remarkable confluence of events in our lives and I am tremendously grateful.

The monster of mechanism

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:05:03 -0400

Sometimes Hillman gets so close:

The folly of reducing mind to brain never seems to leave the Western scene. We can never give it up because it is so basic to our Western rationalist and positivist mind-set The rationalist in the psyche wants to locate causes you can put your hands on and fix.

Machines provide the best models for meeting this desire. Take them apart, find their inner mechanisms, and then adjust their functioning by modifying their ratchets, enriching their fuel, greasing their connections. Henry Ford as father of American mental health.

… The monster of mechanism appears in every century of modern Western history and must be watched for by each generation—especially ours, when to hold out for “something else” besides nature or nurture means believing in ghosts or magic.

Not ghosts and magic! 😱 Much as I love Hillman, bless ‘im, I’m tempted to say an animist is a Jungian with their fingers uncrossed.

Voice of the daimon?

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:03:22 -0400

For years now I’ve thought of myself as conflict avoidant. Maybe there’s another way of framing that. And maybe what I’m about to say is self-justification for continuing unhelpful behavior–but hear me out.

If it’s true that we all have a daimon, guardian angel, inner voice, Self, whatever you want to call it, then it follows that one of the primary ways that inner reality manifests itself is as intuition. If, as Hillman says, the daimon accompanies you in order to keep you on the path of your calling, then intuition can sometimes be navigation.

In mainstream therapeutic culture, the feeling I get when I don’t want to engage in certain conversations–or the feeling that comes afterward when I ignore that reluctance and engage anyway–can be described as conflict avoidance due to certain events of my childhood. It is a very tidy, parsimonious explanation. My behavior is interpreted as an unhelpful, even harmful, repression of my own voice or feelings.

What if, instead, what we call conflict avoidance is my daimon telling me, “not your circus, not your monkeys”? In my own case, I have indeed engaged in difficult conversations involving conflict and even confrontation. The difference being that those conversations had to happen. In order for my life to move forward in one way or another, the conflict had to be faced and resolved. Which, of course, doesn’t mean I enjoyed them.

Listen, like all humans, I’m good at self-justification and that may be what I’m doing. At the same time, I love a weird, unparsimonious explanation. Alarm bells sound anytime someone explains something as “just” whatever.

I’m not the sort of person who is in any danger of turning myself over to unchecked intuitive behavior. My overactive conscience will make sure of that. However, maybe a more trustful disposition to that inner voice is in order.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:26:28 -0400

Someone recommended the Mamaw Gail videos to me, saying they reminded them of their own grandma’s cooking. I’ve watched several (let’s take this one as an example) and something seemed odd about them, especially in the context of “cooking shows.” So I talked through it with Rachel last night and I think we’ve figured it out.

It does remind us of our childhoods, specifically church cooking at all day’s meetings. If you look at the church cookbooks we have from those days, they follow much the same pattern as some of Mamaw Gail’s cooking: mixing together various combinations of boxed ingredients.

To be clear, Mamaw Gail does sometimes cook with whole foods. But her channel is very different from the typical cooking channel—which is part of its charm. Most cooking channels follow the whole foods plus kitchen skills imperative. She does not. In fact, her utensils look like the cheap, worn out type that I remember from my childhood. I doubt Mamaw Gail owns a mandoline. A couple of days ago, I watched her cut up a potatoes and onions in her hand (no cutting board) which instantly reminded me of my grandma doing the same thing.

But is this country cooking? Yes, of a sort. It’s not country cooking that would have been known throughout human history, which was whole foods by necessity. It’s similarly simple, without any aspiration to culinary art. But it’s country cooking with industrial foods, which is a specific and unique thing. It’s the simple cooking of the twentieth century rural poor. It’s not traditional, even if it inspires nostalgia among those (like me) who grew up around it.

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:19:59 -0400

Another thing about The Testament of Ann Lee: it reminded me visually (and to some degree thematically) of Robert Eggers' The Witch, which is my favorite supernatural(?) horror(?) film. I know basically nothing about the technicalities of film but some internet searching tells me other people noticed it as well and it has to do with lighting and period authenticity. Couldn’t prove it by me. I just know both films drew me in visually in similar ways–and something about it deeply appeals to me.

This movie is inspiring a lot of additional thoughts. I have another one brewing but I really ought to do some work today.

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 09:21:09 -0400

I watched The Testament of Ann Lee this morning—thanks to @canneddragons for reminding me of it. Could not have loved it more.

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 06:56:02 -0400

I’ve been reading James Hillman’s Soul Code, published in 1996. He’s mentioned “family values” several times and it’s taken me back to when that phrase was a battleground. It’s inspired a little fantasy.

It’s 1996. Jeremy is driving his Ford Bronco up the big hill on the highway near his house. It struggles, slowing down to 45mph by the time he reaches the top. James Dobson is on the radio and Jeremy is worried about what will happen to the traditional family if Bill Clinton is re-elected.

Poof. A man his dad’s age appears in the passenger seat.

1996 Jeremy: “Ah! Who are you?”

2026 Jeremy: “I’m you, from the future!”

1996: “How did you get here?”

2026: “My desire to make a point transcended time and space.”

1996: “What’s up with the long beard?”

2026: “Beards come back in a major way. Also, look at your chin. It needs some help.”

1996: “And…is that a tattoo???”

2026: “You’re not ready for that story. I’m here to tell a different one.”

1996: “Go on.”

2026: “By my time, evangelicals have abandoned preaching about family values.”

1996: “Because the secular humanists won and put the Christians in prison?”

2026: “No, because they started supporting Donald Trump for president.”

1996: “Donald Trump? You mean that real estate guy from New York who builds casinos and dates models?”

2026: “Yup.”

1996: “Well, then, Trump must have gotten saved.”

2026: “Nope. Well, James Dobson did try to say in 2016 that Trump was a ‘baby Christian’ but literally no one believed that after a while. Right before the election an audio recording was leaked of Trump saying disgusting things about forcing himself onto women because he was famous.”

1996: “Wow! Evangelicals would never have voted for him after that!”

2026: “81% of evangelicals voted for him that year. I’ll never forget that number. Oh and, by the way, it was later revealed that just before the election in 2016, he paid a porn star to keep quiet about their affair, which happened just after his third wife gave birth to their son.”

1996: “Well he certainly lost evangelicals after that.”

2026: “Not even a little bit. James Dobson, in fact, became one of his biggest supporters, even if he tut-tutted now and then about Trump’s swear words.”

1996: “There’s no way. James Dobson has built his entire radio ministry around family values and the central importance of character.”

2026: “Both he and every evangelical you personally know will have abandoned all of that in support of Trump, even after he was connected to one of the most notorious pedophiles of the day.”

1996: “WHAT?”

2026: “It’ll be the result of a million little justifications along the way—all in the pursuit of power.”

1996: “But I take it we don’t end up supporting him?”

2026: “Oh hell no. Oops, sorry about the language.”

1996: “At least we stayed true to Judeo-Christian values!”

2026: “Well, let’s talk about that some other time. One last thing.”

1996: “What’s that?”

2026: “That girl you’re dating? That’s going to go really well.”

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 09:27:24 -0400

I hadn’t listened to bluegrass in years until last weekend when I was frying green tomatoes. (You gotta have music to match the cooking.) I got the itch again today. Now playing: Ralph Stanley, “Clinch Mountain Gospel” 🎵 It’s so good.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:28:04 -0400

I’ve been enjoying tereré in place of coffee for the last few days. Very nice summer drink. This is essentially how I make it, except that I’m using a coffee mug instead of a proper gourd.

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:01:01 -0400

My greatest professional achievement is never having created a LinkedIn account.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:48:32 -0400

After a month of brutal heat, we’re getting a beautiful couple of days.

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:32:35 -0400

Pull the water hose.
It stirs through the lavender:
I, too, am wakened.

Descending fully into this world

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 06:21:58 -0400

James Hillman, The Soul’s Code:

The Platonic myth of growing down with which we began this chapter says the soul descends in four modes-via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival. First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. … Second, admitting yourself to be one among your people and a member of the family tree, including its twisted and rotten branches. Third, living in a place that suits your soul and that ties you down with duties and customs. Last, giving back what circumstances gave you by means of gestures that declare your full attachment to this world.

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:13:51 -0400

From a year ago today: “The men who live in my memory”

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:39:04 -0400

Fried green tomatoes!

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:25:27 -0400

We’ve reached that part of southern Indiana’s summer where literally every day’s forecast is humid with a chance of thunderstorms.