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Breath, Technology, Making of Community 169

the apostolic community whereupon their petrified-in-fear bodies—just
like the walls in which they were contained—started to open up to the cir-
culation of charisma. Described as the baptism in the Spirit, this event col-
lapses any separation between inner and outer, between body and space. In
other words, where previously the body was contained within space, and
these two were conceived as discrete entities, the baptism in the Spirit refor-
mulates such state experience by stressing instead the relational and recipro-
cal nature between body and space that breathing sets in motion: by
inhaling the outside moves in, and by exhaling the inside moves out. Breath,
in short, instantiates St. Paul’s dictum inasmuch as the body becomes the
temple of sacred communication.
What is noteworthy is that such understanding presents a notion of
space, which diverts considerably from the one that influenced the
standards of modern Western architecture as well as philosophical con-
ceptions of “worldview,” which are predicated on the separation
between inside and outside. Modern perspective established the need
to step outside the world so as to order it on the solid grounds of reason.
The Pentecostal abode, on the contrary, does not rest on solid founda-
tions. Indeed, if the ground is the body, then necessarily, the ground is
a moving one.
St. Paul’s call for direct and transparent communication with the
divine has a particular appeal among Catholic Charismatics. This fact
signals an attempt to recover the lay-based forms of direct communica-
tion prior to the advent of modern Roman Catholicism in Brazil during
the second half of the nineteenth century. The new canons and sacra-
ments introduced by the modern Church would lead to what Charismatics
refer to as an excessive rationalization of the Church. Charismatics use
the figure of St. Peter, the stable rock to comment on this rationalization
of the Church and contrast it to St. Paul, the traveler, who made a church,
wherever he went. 3
Furthermore, according to Charismatics, the ideal is to convert the
possibility of seeing into that of seeing through. As they often say, “where
the Church (St. Peter) sees, the CCR (St. Paul) sees through.” At stake is,
once more, the ongoing dispute between the opacities associated with

instrumental mediations of the Church that stand between believers and
the divine as opposed to CCR’s claims for a more direct access. Seeing
and seeing through also express divergence in epistemological terms,
namely, as the Church that “knows,” in opposition to the CCR that
“experiences.” As we will see, this logic of permeability or seeing through
expands into and interconnects the various human and technological
aspects that are constitutive of Canção Nova’s entire universe, including
the economic.