Gustav Bjornstrand
New Member
I wanted to open a thread under this heading, which means I am giving the Pentecostal religion and religious experience a certain inflection: as involving longing and desire. I have the sense---it is not an idea I invented myself of course and is fairly well known---that the spirit of Pentecostalism, or shall I say the 'longing and the desire' for certain intensity of experience in living, is one that has spread out into many different areas in culture and not just in the typical ecstatic liturgy of a Pentecostal meeting. One obvious example is in rock music and other branches of pop music, and it is generally well-know that Elvis came from Pentecostal stock and there are many connecting points between these music forms and the religious/gospel community. In the book from which the following except comes, the origins of Pentecostalism in enthusiastic Christian religious culture is traced (Visions of the Disinherited, Robert Anderson, Oxford, 1979) and it is quite interesting to understand those roots. It is my impression that even in manifestations that would appear unrelated---for example New Age, of interest in Shamanism, and also the jumping in to ecstatic and exotic foreign religious traditions, that the spirit of longing and desire can be found.
Pentecostalism in its classic form is generally seen as being a religion of a lower social class. Often uneducated, often poor, and as the title of the book from which I have taken the excerpts below, from among the 'disenfranchised'. But it is for this reason that I think it is emblematic of a general 'longing and desire' in human beings, and as easy as it is to ridicule some of the practices or assumptions, I think a look at it gives insight into why it is that we long for powerful, inner events, for vision, for knowledge or experience or awakening that seems to come from outside of us, overpower us and 'possess' us. I think there is a somewhat guilty pleasure here and in so many different ways people long for and desire for such experiences. I think that this has a very negative aspect which can be talked about, but also one that is very positive.
I will offer some more comments on what I here post once the thread is up.
(I used postimage.org to turn the PDF of these few pages into an electronic form that can be posted to a forum).
Pentecostalism in its classic form is generally seen as being a religion of a lower social class. Often uneducated, often poor, and as the title of the book from which I have taken the excerpts below, from among the 'disenfranchised'. But it is for this reason that I think it is emblematic of a general 'longing and desire' in human beings, and as easy as it is to ridicule some of the practices or assumptions, I think a look at it gives insight into why it is that we long for powerful, inner events, for vision, for knowledge or experience or awakening that seems to come from outside of us, overpower us and 'possess' us. I think there is a somewhat guilty pleasure here and in so many different ways people long for and desire for such experiences. I think that this has a very negative aspect which can be talked about, but also one that is very positive.
I will offer some more comments on what I here post once the thread is up.
(I used postimage.org to turn the PDF of these few pages into an electronic form that can be posted to a forum).
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