Mistaking Ecstasy for God

There’s a kind of spiritual theatre that I grew up around—a world where the Holy Spirit arrived with fireworks: tongues and trembling, declarations and deliverance, prophecy and power. You were supposed to feel it. To be moved. To be filled with something electric, uncontainable, divine.

And sometimes, people were. I never was. And there were times when this failure left me feeling perplexed and inadequate. I was faithful and zealous – I woke at 5 every morning to study my Bible and pray, and I zealously preached to the unconverted. But when the youth leaders at church encouraged us to speak in tongues, I could not. It felt contrived. “Just speak, “ I was told, “it will come”. I did. It didn’t. I remember a pastor at a mega-church being annoyed with me because I wouldn’t fall over when he touched my forehead. He said I didn’t have enough faith. I knew he was wrong but it still hurt. I remember when a friend, Peggy, was dying of cancer. We fasted and prayed for healing; we shared Communion daily and were baptised again. She died anyway. The inference from the faith healer was that somehow we weren’t right with God. I never set foot in a charismatic church again. And I am by no means the only one. Over the years I have met numerous people with stories that follow the same theme.

You will understand, I hope, why I believe that the Evangelical church’s understanding of the Holy Spirit is not only poorly informed, but actively unChristlike. It breaks people, rather than healing them. It divides rather than unifying, It elevates some and humiliates others. I’ve come to think something else was moving in those ecstasy-filled gatherings. Something very human, very ancient—though no less potent.

Years later I found a language for what I had experienced in the works of anthropologist René Girard. He observed that humans are not autonomous beings, but rather interdependent. And our identities, whether individual or corporate, are rooted in mimetic desire. We catch our longings from each other like a contagion.

This is as true in church as anywhere else. What many traditions call movements of the Spirit are, at least in part, mimetic phenomena. Collective expectation and shared desires generate real experiences—heightened emotion, ecstatic speech, even healing. That doesn’t make them fake. It makes them human. But they are not necessarily divine. And when we confuse the psychosocial with the sacred, we risk baptising rivalry and exclusion under the name of the Spirit.

Because here’s the thing: these spiritual manifestations, so often treated as evidence of divine presence, are just as likely to fragment as to unify. They create insiders and outsiders—those who “have the Spirit” and those who don’t. Those who speak the lingo, feel the fire, perform the signs… and those who remain on the fringes, doubting their worth, praying for something they don’t feel.

But Jesus had something else in mind. When he breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” it wasn’t at a revival. It wasn’t accompanied by spectacle. It wasn’t even public. It was a quiet breath—Genesis rebooted. Creation re-breathed into existence not through power, but through peace.

“If you forgive anyone’s sins,” he said next, “they are forgiven.”

That’s the giveaway.

The Spirit Jesus gives is not a force to be wielded. It is the unbinding of shame. The undoing of blame. It is forgiveness breathed into a room full of frightened scapegoaters, still hiding from what they had done.

The true Spirit doesn’t elevate individuals. It heals between them. It makes many one. The manifestation of the Spirit is not a feeling or a phenomenon, but the restoration of relationship. Wherever two or more are gathered in his name—not in power, not in performance, but in self-giving love—he is there with them (Matthew 18:20). Not above them. Among them. The Spirit is not a private possession. It is the space of holy communion between hearts no longer in rivalry.

Paul saw this clearly. When he speaks of the gifts of the Spirit in 1 Corinthians, he does so only to insist on something deeper: that “the greatest of these is love.” That without love— the self-giving, reconciling kind—all the spiritual gifts are noise and posturing. Without love, the Spirit is counterfeited. And love is always relational. It always flows between. It is realised not in personal transcendence but in encounter.

The Spirit is not a private ecstasy. It is a social re-creation.

It is what happens when the wall between you and me begins to dissolve. When I lay down my claim to righteousness and receive your story as my own. When blame no longer has a foothold. When I see you not as rival or threat or heretic, but as kin. The Holy Spirit is not found in the forceful assertion of spiritual gifts, but in the quiet undoing of rivalry. It is not in the tongues of angels, but in the refusal to speak words that wound. It is not in ecstatic trances, but in the long, hard practice of forgiving one another seventy times seven.

The Spirit is not a spectacle. It is the undoing of spectacle. It is the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead not by breaking the laws of nature, but by revealing the deeper law beneath them: that death does not have the final word. That the scapegoat lives. That love endures.

So when we say “Come, Holy Spirit,” what we seek is not a badge of divine favour or proof of chosenness. We are calling for the very logic of love — that which exists not in one, but always between. More, we are asking to be undone, to be rewoven, to be healed of the lie that we are alone. We are expressing a commitment to participate in the universal logic of love that Jesus’ resurrection exposed, bound together by his spirit that does not speak in tongues of conquest but in the quiet grammar of shared humanity.