How Laughter Saved My Life
I don't often like to disclose the source of my sermon topics - but this morning it seems only right to let you in on the secret. Several months ago, after our District Assembly meeting of Unitarian Universalist congregations, I was sitting in the corner at a reception with a friend - Reverend Naomi King - a fellow minister here in Utica, New York. Naomi has come to know me fairly well thanks to our overlapping time in seminary and our proximity to one another here in New York - and as we sat there in the corner of the reception this spring - we began to talk about our sermons from the past year and our worship themes for the coming summer. Jokingly, she asked me how many sermons I'd given on the topic of suffering - you see she knows me - and she knows about my particular interest in the spiritual alchemy that occurs for so many of us as we do the hard work of turning pain to insight - of transforming our most tender places into our places of strength.
So this past spring, as Naomi and I discussed our sermon topics - it was no surprise that there she was, ribbing me as usual, about my tendencies toward seriousness. And after our laughter subsided, my friend Naomi threw down the gauntlet. "What if you stretched yourself a bit this summer," she said, "what if you did a sermon on laughter?"
A sermon on laughter, I thought, I'm not sure if I'm up to it - but the gauntlet was thrown down and I could not resist - so here we are with our sermon of the day - How Laughter Saved My Life - a bit of lightness combined with my characteristic seriousness.
A bit of lightness - punctuation - relief - renewal - uncontrolled openness - the riot that explodes from the depths of my body - these are just a few of my experiences of laughter - of joy, as one piece, one sure through line of the spiritual life. Laughter is the sun that peeks through the clouds - the break in the darkness with light shooting through - I can see the picture in my mind almost anytime - I've seen it in nature photos and in religious imagery - sometimes I think that sun peeking through the clouds is the most frequently used image that we humans have for God - and I have surely known for myself - that on this spiritual journey we all need a break from time to time - we all need to heed the words of the poet and stop for awhile - stop trying to pull our selves together looking for some clear meaning, some momentary summary. We all need, as Whitman advised, to lounge and invite the soul - to get enough sleep - to linger and lunge and just plain rest. We all need to lay back in the shade and let the light creep back in.
So often we bring all of our intensity to our lives. We make lists, we chart courses, we set goals. And many of us do this with our spiritual lives as well. We read and we study - we meditate or pray or offer ourselves up to serve the greater good. We set our spiritual course - hoping for enlightenment, or at least a bit of serenity and a lessening of guilt - and we get to work, nose to the grindstone. But as one colleague of mine has said - the spiritual life is more like singing in the bathtub than it is like getting to work.
Like singing in the bathtub - the spiritual life at its best is spontaneous - it is unself-conscious - it can be done by anyone, no special skills or talents are requires, no expert teachers are necessary. Like singing in the bathtub - the spiritual life at its best is a response to the wonder of the world around us - and there we are, joyful even as we do the necessary work of washing ourselves clean.
When we let go - if only for a moment - of the idea of the spiritual life as a quest, as an adventure or a dramatic survival story that we must tackle head on and directly - when we let go of the struggle and the striving if only for a moment, we let in the possibility of joy - of laughter - of rest along the way - and we begin to entertain the value of circling an experience or an idea like a spiral, the value of surprise in our spiritual journeys, the value of fallow times in the field if a worthwhile harvest is to come. When we take the time to rest and enjoy life as an integral part of our spiritual journey, we are often renewed beyond our wildest imaginings. As I rest, I have found, as I turn my attention to joy, as I put down my work and my strivings and all of my best intentions - it is then, most often for me, that the insights I have been searching for come my way.
The poet Mary Oliver tells of her own experience with this phenomenon in her book, Long Life. "Once, years ago," she writes, "I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and - it was the most casual of moments - as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not al all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity- - the summer morning, its gentleness, the sense of the great work being done through the grass where I stood scarcely trembled. As I say, it was the most causal of moments, not mystical as the word is usually meant, for there was no vision, or anything extraordinary at all, but only a sudden awareness of the citizenry of all things within one world: leaves, dust, thrushes and finches, men and women. And yet it was a moment I have never forgotten, and upon which I have based many decision in the years since.
"My story" - she says - "contains neither a mountain, nor a canyon, nor a blizzard, nor hail, nor spike of wind striking the earth and lifting whatever is in its path. I think the rare and wonderful awareness I felt would not have arrived in any such busy hour"...rather "I would hazard this guess, that it is more likely to happen to someone attentively entering the quiet moment, when the sun-soaked world is gliding on under the blessings of blue sky, and the wind god is asleep. Then, if ever, we may peek under the veil of all appearances and partialities. We may be touched by the most powerful of suppositions - even to a certainty - as we stand in the rose petals of the sun and hear a murmur from the wind no louder than the sound it makes as it dozes under the bee's wings. This, too, I suggest, is...worthy of respect."[1]
This too, this peace and awareness - this seizure of happiness that might come upon us in our casual moments - far from the drama of ups and downs that we typically expect - this too, is worthy of respect.
Even in our most casual of moments - the capacity for joy is there - the possibility of laughter exists - and this, I think, can be what saves our lives - it can be what makes our lives worth living at all.
For who would want a spiritual life, really, if it were all seriousness and suffering, if it were all deprivation and control and held none of the sheer joy of existence - the base animal joys of pleasure - of good food and comfortable surroundings and fine companions - the intellectual joys of success, of double entendres and irony and wit and the turn of a phrase just so - the spiritual and emotional joys of relief, of possibility, of transformation and of the streaming of light into seemingly unending darkness. As much as I value the studious, the serious, the sometimes sublime rewards of spiritual living - they simply would not be enough to sustain me on their own. I need the break in the clouds - the unexpected joy - the surprise and the surrender as I trip over joy and burst out in laughter saying "I surrender!' Putting down - if only for a time - and if only when forced - my seriousness of intent - my clear perseverance and drive in the work of the spiritual life.
One of the dangers I have found in myself in living a spiritual life, and one of the dangers I'll bet that I share with at least one other person in this room, is the tendency my friend Naomi pointed out - the tendency to take things a bit too far from time to time - to struggle and strive and try without letting up - pushing myself and those around me to the point of exhaustion - missing along the way the small joys and the sublime chess moves of the universe that make the journey worthwhile. And while some of us bring that intensity to journey of a spiritual life - at other times the intensity is brought to us in the form of illness or depression, circumstance or the simple piling up of numerous trials at once.
The author, Kathleen Norris, talks about this kind of bombardment and its dangers in an article she wrote several years ago for the Christian Century magazine. The article, titled, "Plain Old Sloth: A Case of Soul-Weariness," takes us through the trials of one long year for Norris, and eventually to the insights on the other side. In it Norris writes, "I've had plenty of chances to laugh at myself in the last year. Once, when I was sunk so deep in lethargy and sloth that there seemed no end in sight, an interviewer termed me a 'docent of hope.' How comical, to be reminded that the books I churned out over the past ten years - Dakota, the Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and The Virgin of Barrington - were out there in the world, proclaiming the good news while I sat stupefied, unable to write even a postcard.
"I have always been an industrious person," Norris writes, "good at meeting deadlines. My strength has always been that of the woman warrior, good in a crisis, good at striving against the odds. But as so often happens...this year my strength became my weakness. I could function, but not feel. I could generally meet my responsibilities as a caregiver to my husband and my dying father, and help support my mother, but I felt dead inside. I dreaded waking in the morning and sometimes went straight from bed to the couch, where I would watch television or do crossword puzzles until it became absolutely necessary to rouse myself to action...I was a far weaker soul than I cared to admit, a person pathetically subject to the sin of sloth.
"We often think of sloth as a harmless form of physical laziness, and joke about how long it's been since we vacuumed the carpet. But sloth is much more than laziness. It is an inability to concentrate on serious matters, and profound weariness of the soul. As Evelyn Waugh once wrote, 'The malice of sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty but in the refusal of joy.'"[2]
The malice of sloth lies not merely in the neglect of duty but in the refusal of joy - this statement hits my ears as ringing truth - that it is not so much the neglect of duty - it is not so much the tiredness or the sheer exhaustion that comes over us at different times along this spiritual journey that poses the danger to our spiritual lives - but rather the true danger lies in the refusal of joy - in the inability or the unwillingness to laugh - in the tendency some of us share to take ourselves and the problems of the world so darn seriously that it feels like a betrayal to enjoy a sunset or to laugh at a joke - this is, she says, is where the danger lies - it is in our refusal of joy - our refusal to stop trying to pull ourselves together, our refusal to throw up our hands and say, I surrender, our refusal to literally trip over the joy that is all around us as we hold tight to the illusion that we still have a thousand serious moves in this game of life.
Near the end of her article, Norris confesses that despite the numbness of that year, she thanks God that in the midst of it all she was able to delight in her husband's company, and enjoy her father's wit and humor until the night he died. In the midst of those difficult and heart-wrenching situations - in the midst of her own exhaustion, joy still came through. Connection and surprise and the beauty of small moments restored her heart - and as all of us who have gone through our own difficult times know - it is often those unexpected moments of joy and laughter that allow us to keep going when we feel ready to give up.
Over this past year - I've had the honor of walking with several people as they have struggled with serious illnesses - and at some point along their journeys, each of these folks have asked for the same thing - laughter, humor, a bit of lightness in their long and tiring days - and so they have inspired me to begin a collection of books and tapes and cds that make me laugh - and that I hope make them laugh as well. Finding joy again, knowing laughter even in the midst of pain and discomfort - it renews our energy and our spirit. It can be the beacon reminding us that healing is indeed happening - that the mending and the weaving and the knitting back together of our hearts and minds and souls is indeed occurring there even in the darkness - whether we see it on the outside or not.
So as we make our way on this spiritual journey together, friends, I'd like to leave you with a challenge first offered to me by friend ten years ago. She listened to my struggles, yes, and she comforted me in my pain. She made me tea and set me down on her couch wrapped in a blanket when I wondered if I could go on. And as I left her apartment each and every time she threw down the gauntlet - do something fun for yourself every day, she said, do something that makes you laugh, that makes you smile, that brings you joy and comfort - and come back tomorrow, my friend she would say, and tell me all about it.
As we leave this place today - I invite you to take up the challenge as well - to do something fun for yourself and for your family - to welcome joy and laughter and comfort into your life as surely as you do the challenge of the spiritual journey - go out and do something just for fun - and come back next week and tell me all about it.
May it be so, and Amen.
August 27, 2006
- Mary Oliver, Long Life. Da Capo Press, 2004, pp. 33-34.
- Kathleen Norris, "Plain Old Sloth: A Case of Soul-Weariness". Christian Century, January 11, 2003. pp. 8-9.