In the beginning was the laugh. Last week I spent 48 hours on retreat with my ministerial colleagues from the St. Lawrence Unitarian Universalist District. The timing is right. By late October the batteries need recharging. And so we go off by ourselves in some sylvan setting to hear our tales of weal and woe and to encourage one another.
Monday night we sat around - as it happened - under a crucifix - it was, after all, an Episcopalian conference center - and quite spontaneously began to regale one another with some of the foibles of our ministerial performance.
It quickly became a 1997 version of the old comedy show, "Can You Top This?" in which comedians challenge one another with their jokes. Only we were not sharing jokes, but the laughter that comes from the impossible possibility of trying to be a minister. There were stories - without name attribution - of mispronounced names at weddings, strange slips of the tongue at worship, and even the occasional paradox of humor at funerals and memorial services.
One among us told of his first funeral while a graduate student at Columbia University preparing for the Presbyterian ministry. It was a typically hot and humid Long Island day on which he had two three-hour comprehensives before the service. The funeral home was crowded and the air was suffused with the aroma of too many flowers. As he began the service, he fainted dead away. Revived, he tried again, only to be carried off vomiting. It was an unmitigated disaster. The following week he mustered up the courage to call the bereaved widow to apologize. She kindly said no apology was necessary; his troubles had taken her mind off her own troubles, and she was grateful - at least that is what he said she said.
At Tuesday night's worship service, another of our number told the story of a great tree in China which grew near the village shrine. A young carpenter's apprentice inquired impatiently of the master carpenter why he continually walked by the tree and did not use its wood. The wise one said the tree had no utility for woodworking; its beauty was that it was useless in terms of the ways of the world.
We instantly began to get the idea - we who believe ourselves so useful, so indispensable to the world. We define ourselves by our utility, not our worth - like the worth of the great tree whose only task was to be there in the village square. As we began to laugh at our own pretensions, our leader had trouble continuing - the laughter began to swell - I hoped he knew we were not laughing at him but with him - intuitively grasping the point of his story before he could explain it to us. It was an uproarious and healing laughter. Only later did I realize that the sound of laughter is a long series of "ahas."
The juxtaposition of humor and religion may seem strange to some. Religion is supposed to be so solemn. A few years ago a member of our congregation sent me the cover of the December 1992 "Cable TV Guide" on which there is a picture of a very serious, almost scowling, Charlton Heston looking for all the world like the Moses he has portrayed, holding a Bible. The caption read, "Special Report: God and TV: Looking at religion through the eyes of television. Charlton Heston brings the Bible to Cable." Across the face of the cover my friend had taped the following message: "Religion is nothing to smile about."
Historically humor and religion have often been together - sometimes happily, sometimes not. The Aborigines of South Australia tell a creation myth that "humans were created from excrement. The excrement was then molded into human form and tickled, thus causing the image to laugh and come alive." According to a Polynesian creation legend, the first couple looked at each other's nakedness and laughed. We've been laughing ever since.
In ancient Egypt the Creator confronts Chaos and, as he laughs it off, delivers a world of joy and exuberance. "When God laughed, seven gods were born to rule the world....When he burst out laughing there was light...When he burst out laughing the second time the waters were born; at the seventh burst of laughter, the soul was born."
In Africa, natives were noted for their hearty, full-bodied laughter until the Christian missionaries came; they regarded laughter as pagan. So, after their reeducation in Christian ways, the natives developed a nervous, suppressed and embarrassed laughter known as "mission giggle."
Christianity had trouble with laughter. The Fall of Adam became a fall into seriousness, laughter a "wart on the human soul." Early Church Father John Chrysostom said, "This world is not a theater in which we can laugh; and we are not assembled together in order to burst into peals of laughter, but to weep for our sins....It is not God who gives us the chance to play, but the devil." The Rule of St. Benedict read, "As for coarse jests and idle words that lead to laughter, these we condemn with a perpetual ban."
Sometimes, however, the clergy cannot avoid humor. One Dominican monk, describing the fields of activity in which the various monastic orders specialize, said, "Take the Trappists. They derive spiritual insights from observing silence. The Jesuits, of course, are the intellectuals and teachers among the orders; the Franciscans feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and take care of animals. We Dominicans meditate a great deal on humility. I think I may say that in humility we are tops."
The Buddhists have historically asked whether or not the serenely serious Buddha ever laughed. Without fully answering that question ancient scholars posited six levels of laughter, all the way from sita, a faint smile barely showing the teeth - appropriate for the most refined - to Atihasita, a backslapping, doubling over in raucous guffawing - appropriate for the lowest castes. Our ministerial retreat was definitely a lower class experience.
In the Ramayama, an ancient Hindu scripture, we find a somewhat more sympathetic attitude toward humor, "There are three things that are real: God, human folly, and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do what we can with the third."
Surely humorist H. L. Mencken was wrong in saying, "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing." Theology is unthinkable without humor. In fact we are homo risens - the laughing animal. So far as we know we are the only creatures who have a sense of humor ironically alongside tragedy, for we are also the animal that knows it must die.
The Greeks knew all-too-well the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy - the two masks appeared side-by-side in their dramatic art. The "valley of delight" is also the "valley of the shadow of death." We laugh when we understand the brevity of life and the inevitability of death - how paradoxical it seems we pour ourselves into the living of a life, knowing all the time that no one gets out of here alive.
For many of us our center of gravity is levity, that is, being able to discern the lighter side of things is critical to our religious outlook. Without laughter to lubricate the difficulties of the everyday life would either be a bore or merely a struggle. When we truly reflect on our existence we see the wisdom of William Saroyan's understanding of life as "the human comedy."
Nowhere is this more dramatically seen than in the work of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin came from a broken home in one of the poorest sections of London, his father died in an alcoholic ward, his mother was taken to a mental institution, and young Charlie grew up in an orphanage. In his movie character he was putting himself and his world together. Reflecting on his work, he said, "I am always aware that Charlie is playing with death. He plays with it, mocks it, thumbs his nose at it, but it's always there. He is aware of death at every moment of his existence, and he is terribly aware of being alive....And he is bringing more life. That is his only excuse, his only purpose."
Of course we now know the physiological benefits of laughter - the release of healing endorphins. Laughter causes good vibrations, the whole system vibrates, the system dances, and we live longer. A sense of humor, then, takes it place beside the five senses.
As if that weren't enough, humor has religious significance. There is nothing that tells us more about human nature than laughter. Take, for example, one of my favorite stories about human arrogance and stubbornness. A U.S. aircraft carrier moving in fog received a radio message - "Divert your course." The confident response was, "This is a U.S. aircraft carrier and we will maintain our course." This went on for several exchanges. Then, the radio message crackled intently, "This is the Puget Sound Lighthouse. It's your call."
That clarifies the difference between what we are and what we think we are. Our ministerial downloading of our foibles on the job last week clearly reminded us of the danger of becoming too self-possessed as plumbers of the human soul. As we plumb the depths of others, we do well to plumb our own depths and find the folly and the fun residing there.
And there is so much fun in the world. One of my favorite recent cartoons is of a scholarly professor pointing to a chart on which is written the formula for Einstein's theory of relativity, E equals MC squared - energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. The caption reads: "As this chart shows, one engineer is worth two management consultants."
It is a case of holy hilarity. I think of the old preacher who pointed out the wild incongruity of life when he said, "If you could just see yourself walk by, you would burst out in laughter." I think of that sometimes when I walk importantly into the pulpit or a meeting or a home. I realize I carry with me a tradition of caring and daring, of poetry and prophecy, but I also realize the fallibility of this current carrier of ministerial culture. And sometimes I laugh at how ridiculous I must seem.
There is a redemptive quality in being able to laugh at ourselves. There is a healing that takes place when we can see ourselves under the eyes of eternity - to see how infinitesimal we are in the great infinity of being - to see ourselves as humble creatures in a vast creation that can get along very well without us.
Life without humor becomes impossible for me. I am like the Jack Nicholson character in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest - the technically sick fellow who single-handedly brought laughter to a mental hospital by cutting through the cruelty of a domineering nurse.
The character, a voice laughing in the wilderness, says, "That's the first thing that got me about this place, there wasn't anybody laughing. I haven't heard a real laugh since when I came through that door....Man, when you lose your laugh you lose your footing." He helped regain his footing, but lost his life - comedy and tragedy in one cinematic hour.
Healing humor helps us as we cope with the caprice of the cosmos, with the paradoxical elements of existence, with the contradictions that mark our lives, with the unfairness of life, with human folly, most especially our own.
As the elephant says in Carmen B. de Gasztold's "Prayers from the Ark," "Give me such philosophic thoughts that I can rejoice everywhere I go in the lovable oddity of things." The lovable oddity of things. How did the elephant know?
Life without humor," as one wag put it, "is no laughing matter." That is why my colleagues and I spent much of our time in laughter - we who are presumed to be so seriously engaged in salvation - our own and the world's.
I haven't told you how we spent yet another evening - playing charades. Gathered there in that meeting room, under the crucifix, a gathering of souls with doctorates, masters degrees, who stand before their congregations, sometimes in robes, most times in dignity - played charades into the night until the tears came to our eyes - tears that came not because of the somber scene above us - but from the human comedy of which we are a part.
In Unitarian Universalist author Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, God has just created Adam, who, upon coming to life and looking around blinking, asks, "What is the purpose of all this?" God questions in return: "Everything must have a purpose?" "Certainly," said Adam emphatically. God said, "Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this." And God went away. The purpose of life with a comic vision in an ultimately tragic world is to live, as the purpose of dancing is to dance - not to arrive to some distant point on dance floor. The purpose of a game is to play the game, a game we ultimately must lose. Humor, I conclude, helps us, not so much to make sense out of life, as to enable us to live more gracefully with its seeming senselessness.
"Thank God for humor," says Howard Thurman. Regardless of the source, I am grateful. I function better as a human being when I can laugh at life and at myself. Laughter lets me know the world is all right, that I am OK. Our ministerial retreat helped me understand how closely comedy and tragedy are intertwined in human existence, how necessary they are to one another. With Charlie Chaplin I know my task is to bring more life - that is my only excuse, my only purpose.
I leave you with a futuristic story suggesting in the final analysis life is a deadly serious matter. A new arrival asks St. Peter the way to the executive washroom and a Dr. Gilbert is informed: "Ah, yes, Dr. Gilbert. Let's see here. Ah. You're being reincarnated as a mayfly. Have a nice day."
And a nice day to you, too.
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