steve-mada

[steve-mada]

ii.         let him speak through you

Messianic Congregation Shema Yisrael

Owings Mills, MD

1995

My father speaks in tongues most akin to crude, ulpan-forged Hebrew with sprinklings of an arrogant American’s intermediate French. Hands go up like The Wave around the congregation. Spittle-y ch’s (i.e. Chanukah, challah) percolate around the sanctuary but he’s seemingly alone in intermingling nasal ens and zhs.

I have only a vague idea of how Icelandic sounds—enough to know my mother’s tongues could work as hooks backed by The Sugarcubes’ jangly pop confections.

The Holy Spirit hovers around the sanctuary, an invisible vacuum wand. My father’s hands go up; my mother’s hands go up, she intones, “Kinny keeny kora pity lala sha.”

Assemblies of God Summer Camp

Falling Waters, West Virginia

1995

Len’s a counselor-in-training and has his own tiny, private room at the end of our bunkhouse. I’m excited and worried in equal measure when, voila, he removes a blanket to unveil his contraband records and turntable.

He whisks The Sugarcubes’ life’s too good out of its sleeve, sets it a-spin; he tenderly lowers his headphones over my ears. Then, holding eye contact, he drops the stylus to vinyl in the middle of “Cat,” mid-Bjork-sermon, her voice undulating in Icelandic, cadence alone rendering translation unnecessary. It awakens something essential and estranging.

Baltimore Metro Area 

1983-1985

Under threat of divorce, my father—an agnostic Jew—goes to detox. In the critical months that follow, he stays sober—in large part—by fully immersing himself in the twelve steps of Narcotics Anonymous.

One might presume that buy-in to steps two (“Came to believe a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”) and three (“Turned our will and our lives over to the care of god as we understood him”) render some “newcomers” susceptible to proselytizing. One would be correct: my Jewish newcomer father finds Jesus in a church parking lot after an NA meeting.

He spends the next two decades evangelizing to essentially anyone in his path, with little regard for social norms or familial backlash (Jesus is not even just all right with the rest of our family).

Though he studies and refers to AA’s The Big Book nearly as much (and as annoyingly) as he does the Bible, this passage from The Family Afterward is apparently lost on him:

“Assume, on the other hand that father has, at the outset, a stirring spiritual experience. Overnight, as it were, he is a different man. He becomes a religious enthusiast. He is unable to focus on anything else. As soon as his sobriety begins to be taken as a matter of course, the family may look at their strange new dad with apprehension, then with irritation. There is talk of spiritual matters morning, noon and night. He may demand that the family find God in a hurry, or exhibit amazing indifference to them and say he is above worldly considerations” (AA World Services, 1939).

Assemblies of God Summer Camp

Falling Waters, West Virginia

1993

If you run into my bunkmate Cory, you can count on a few things: he’ll somehow remind you he’s from Philly, and he’ll dismiss most anything you say as “gay.” I’m not sure if I want him to like me because he’s twice my size or, simply, because he doesn’t like me.

After lights out, he asks Jacob and I—in his best approximation of earnestly curious—how we, Jew Boys, landed in church camp. I take the bait (Jacob is uninterested in Cory’s approval), but before I can say the words Messianic Jew heclicks on his flashlight and projects his dick onto the ceiling.

Len and I tote our acoustic guitars down to the bathhouse. He tells me how Hold On, I’m Coming was recorded in a Stax Recordsbathroom then breaks into a stilted rendition of the chorus that bounces off the concrete block walls. Muffled sniggering alerts me to a dread-inducing pair of flip-flops—emblazoned with the Philadelphia Eagles logo—peeking out from under one of the stalls.

Text Messages

Present Day

Me: I’m in the middle of this psychedelic, absurdist short story by a Japanese author who wrote the piece in German. It reads like a fever dream, expressed in tongues.

Jacob: That’s the thing about stuff translated from another language, especially one farther away from English. On a certain level, it’s like eating food someone chewed for you.

Azusa Street Revival 

Los Angeles

1906

A multi-cultural milieu from across the continent flock to the revival. First-hand accounts suggest monolingual attendees are moved by the spirit to speak fluently in the native tongues of others present and, in some cases, miraculously translate it back into English.   

The revival remains newsworthy for years—a rare instance in its time where Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, and Asians all worship together and women figure prominently in leadership. It’s essentially the origin story of the Assemblies of God church: the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination.

Assemblies of God Summer Camp

Falling Waters, West Virginia

1993

Cory’s up on stage blinking out goopy tears. The preacher palms his head like a basketball.

“Young man, let the Lord speak through you.” He presses his mic against Cory’s trembling lips.

“Sheda coola bassa nova.”

Jacob and I look at each other and start convulsing.

[steve-mada]

2021

“You’re familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, right?” Jacob asks me, knowing full well I am not.

We’re standing along the first base line at his son’s tee-ball game. Apart from the exasperated dad behind home plate, exhorting his reluctant son to please hit the ball off the tee and run toward us, no one here seems remotely engaged. Uniformed five-year-olds are meandering, picking grass, kicking dirt, doing interpretative dances; parents scattered about the perimeter seem lost in their phones.

“The Voynich Diaries?”

“The Voynich Manuscript. It’s up at Yale—it’s this two-hundred-and-some-odd page tome in an unknown language chock full of tripped-out sketches: centaurs, naked ladies bathing in giant flower petals…”

Someone behind us yells, “Look alive out there!” at the unconcerned kids in the field. The little boy at the plate heaves his bat in the general direction of the tee and misses, badly. The bat nearly clips his father’s kneecap who alertly jackknifes out of the way then stumbles forward, bumping the tee. The tee wobbles itself back into a stasis that dislodges the ball which casually plunks home plate, cuing a collective groan from the bleachers.

Jacob and I have been playing catch with creative fodder like this Voynich business for decades—“mind melds” on esoterica that steep over weeks or months until tea leaves become legible. Last time I saw him, he’d gone on about a particular physicist’s work on time travel: This dude, Mallet, posited a theoretically airtight—if impractical—solution for time travel…

The dad at home plate has taken his son’s bat; his kid is squinting up at him. “Buddy, you want to be short to the ball. Like this.” He demonstrates a compact swing, stopping just short of the tee then looks at his son who nods his head with sarcastic vigor. As if staring into a Magic Eye puzzle, I discover Ted, my high school teammate, in the composite of the boy and his dad’s faces. I’m willfully sucked up through a psychic vacuum tube, spit back out where I stand in 1995. Coach Doug is demonstrating the same “short swing” to the teenage Ted I knew.

Jacob breaks through my reverie. “Voynich has been passed around for centuries,” he says. “And countless futile attempts to decipher it. But no one knows what the fuck it is.”

 “Is that Ted Cohen and his kid?”

“Oh yeah, you probably know half of these kids’ parents. Anyway, at one point, Friedman—dude who cracked the Japanese code in dubya dubya two—took a stab at the manuscript with a team of cryptographers. They got nothin.” 

“Voynich?”

“Voynich indeed.”

Jacob’s son, Scott, who’d been “playing left field,” appears beside us. 

“Daddy, I want to go home.”

“We’re definitely going home soon. Do you want to get back out there with your teammates and leave after this inning?”

Scott squints up at Jacob’s inscrutable half-smile, and I recall that Mallett’s work on time travel began in earnest when he was ten, the day his father died of a heart attack. His entire career was devoted to traveling back to prevent this.

Scott gallops back out toward his position, and Jacob proffers, “A lot of people think the manuscript’s language—they call it ‘Voychinese’—is written tongues, glossolalia. Linguists generally write tongues off as nonsense but here’s the thing: certain linguistic patterns prove Voynich can’t be gibberish.”

[steve-mada]

Steve Mada's forthcoming debut novel, Glossolalia, explores Messianic Judaism and addiction through adolescent eyes.