I have over recent years conducted and participated in several family funerals. It is my role to hold folk through this painful and tear filled rights of passage. This included two younger cousins last year. The last time I was up in North Yorkshire where our Jack lives, it was to conduct his dad’s funeral. Jack’s dad was my step dad growing up. He was a difficult man, who had many children. Jack is the same age as his eldest daughter’s granddaughter. To say I had a difficult time growing up with him is an understatement. All of we siblings were deeply affected by our formative years. Following his funeral I went through a difficult personal time, it certainly contributed to my marriage failure. It took a long time to come to terms with the complex emotions that followed his death. The last few years have been a time for healing.
Last weekend proved this to me; it proved how much healing has occurred in recent years; last weekend was a time of great joy, filled with humour and so much laughter. The journey home with Alex, in which we stopped a few times, visiting little Yorkshire villages, may well have been one of the most joyful, fun and laughter filled few hours of my life. It will live with me for years.
There were many amusing moments throughout the wedding. One of bride’s party thought I was Jack’s dad. When he discovered I was conducting the service, he almost died of shock, I was not what he expected. The service was humour filled and our Jack burst into laughter at the line “With my body I honour you” for the ring blessing. The service was beautifully received by all and I feel that it was a ritual that brought healing for so many of us.
The speeches were a mixed bag. Our Jack’s was fantastic, the others not so much. What was amusing was the constant running commentary of Jack’s dad’s oldest friend, who was not too pleased with the father of the bride. It went of four hours. We all shared a wonderful few hours together. I think the most amusing on going conversation was the one attempting to explain how and it what ways we are all related and connected. My sister topped it off with a diagram she drew for her partner in a vain attempt to explain it all. It was futile but brought a great deal of joy and laughter in the end.
The weekend felt like one of joy and healing. Yes, there were tears and I know for many folk there is more healing needed. I felt in myself it was a rite of passage that proved to me that I have healed from some of my own pain. There are memories that will stay with me all my life. It proved to me once more that there is always a time to laugh and a time to cry.
Earlier we shared those timeless words from Ecclesiastes 3:
“For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven.” And the seasons turn and pass and come again. There is “A time to weep and a time to laugh”. Over the last few years these words have taken on a whole new and deeper meaning. I suspect post Covid I wept more than I have ever done and by the same token I suspect I laughed more than I have ever done. I know for a fact I felt more than I ever done. I have never been more alive. I have lived with an un-defended heart and have seen the truth that this truly is the only way to live. I have felt every breath, I have not turned away. I have never felt the presence of God more deeply. This beautiful sense of calm, that still small voice in the core of my being, that love that passeth all understanding. I felt this powerfully last weekend and these last few days since. There have been tears, there has been joy and there has been laughter too.
Now I’ve not always been the kind of man who was easily moved to tears. I was as a boy, but not always as a man. There have been seasons of my life where there were few if any tears, those times when nothing touched me. I can hardly remember those seasons sadly, sometimes trying to remember those soulless days can bring tears to my eyes today.
The seasons of my life that I remember by heart and not merely head are the ones in which I have shed tears. Whether they were tears of joy; tears of sorrow; tears of awe; tears of pain; tears of frustration; tears of relief; tears of laughter. These are the thick seasons when the most profound experiences of life have occurred and deeper understanding has usually followed. During these moments I have learnt what it means to be alive. These moments have shaped my soul and built my character.
I wonder what this coming season will bring? For seasons come and seasons go, just like the cherry blossom that has half fallen now.
There is a time to live, even when we feel heartbroken, when we cry. The best funerals are often filled with joy and laughter as we remember our times with our lost loved ones. Those precious memories. I have noticed also that when I am with family we often share memories that bring laughter, even deeply painful and confusing ones. I think it is something about surviving and or being with those who you love and care about so much. You see just like sadness and tears laughter is a communal experience; just as we bind together in our tears and suffering we are also bound together in our joy and laughter. When people laugh together there is nothing more beautiful, it can be infectious too.
Now I’m not talking about the kind of laughter and humour that is simply mocking, especially of those weaker in society, I’m not sure this is humour at all. It certainly isn’t inspired by joyousness, more cynicism, which no one is immune from,
Spiritual freedom brings with it the ability to laugh and not to take yourself too seriously, but it’s not about picking at other people’s perceived faults and inadequacies. This does not bring people together it just aids a sense of superiority at the expense of another. There is nothing liberating or freeing in this.
Now religion and spirituality are not often arenas where humour is obviously found and yet I have come to know that the more spiritually liberated I have become, and the more religious in its truest sense I have become, the more I have discovered my own funny bones. When I saw life as a tragedy I never felt more alone and yet when I began to see life more as kind of divine comedy with tragic elements I began to feel a part of life once more.
The ancient Greeks understood this. From their religious rituals grew two forms of theatre. One was tragedy and the other was comedy, the rituals of Dionysius incorporated both elements. The tragedies motto was “woe is me”, they portrayed situations in which the people, due to their natures, were fated to focus on their own suffering. Whereas the comedies motto was “Get over yourself”, they too expressed situations that included suffering but in these tales the people were enabled to discover ways out of these situations.
Comedy is there in the Abrahamic faiths too. There is a rich tradition of humour in Judaism, but humour is also a part of both Christian and Islamic traditions. Mulla Nasruddhin is the archetype of the holy fool. The early Christian Desert Father’s found humour within their spirituality. “In Stories of the Spirit” Jack Kornfield recounts a saying of Abba Or, who said “Either flee from people, or laugh at the world and the people in it, and make a fool of yourself in many things.” Humour is also found in the traditions of the East too, certainly in many of the Buddhist tales. It saddens me that in the modern age so much of this seems to have got lost as the poe faced and more puritanical factions have become the dominant elements in religion. And yet as Karl Barth has claimed “laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.”
“Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.”
Why is this you might well ask? Well because laughter brings us together, it takes us beyond the confines of our narrow selves. It takes us beyond the confines of our own thinking minds, it helps not to take ourselves too seriously and opens our hearts beyond the confines of our own egos, there is a reason that it is said to be the best medicine. Life is far too serious a business to be taken too seriously. As J.B. Priestly claimed “There is in happiness an element of self-forgetfulness. You lose yourself in something outside yourself when you are happy; just as when you are desperately miserable you are intensely conscious of yourself, you are a solid little lump of ego weighing a ton.”
There is a place for silliness, especially in the most difficult of times. The journey home last weekend was one of the most joyful few hours I have ever spent as my friend and I entertained one another. We shared ridiculous stories from our own lives, including some painful and tragic ones. She is approaching the first anniversary of the tragic death of her brother. We shared many moments of joy together, but also deep pain too.
I cannot repeat some of the things we talked about, I will leave that to your imaginations. I also attempted to explain to her how my family members are related to one another. It was a futile effort, but it filled us both with joy and laughter. A beautiful few hours of loving connection and memories that will stay with me for ever. We made laughter memories with each other. The laughter bound us together.
It brought to mind some rather lovely words by the Bendictine nun and author Joan Chittister.
“Humor gives a people dignity in situations that denigrate them. Laughter gives us relief from the burden of dailiness. No amount of coercion can break an unbreakable spirit, humor teaches us.. . . Humor cuts oppressors down to size, takes their sting away, renders them powerless to destroy us. Don't give in to what diminishes you. Learn to laugh at it and reduce its power over you.”
This reminded me of some words by the great pre-war theologian Harry Emerson Fosdick, he wrote “Happiness at its deepest and best is not the portion of a cushioned life which never struggled,...bore hardships, or adventured in sacrifice for costly aims. A heart of joy is never found in luxuriously coddled lives, but in men and women who achieve and dare, who have tried their powers against antagonisms, who have met even sickness and bereavement and have tempered their souls in fire…”
An undefended heart is one that both gives and receives laughter. The journey home together, proved this once more to me. Laughter memories that will stay with me forever. We both felt the Love Divine within us.
As John O’Donohue claimed "I think that laughter is one of the really vital dimensions of the divine presence that has been totally neglected.
I often feel when the Divine One beholds us obsessed in our intricate maze of anxiety and planning and intentionality, that She can’t stop laughing.
It’s great for people, actually, to laugh, too. I love a sense of humour in a person. It’s one of my favorite things, because I think when somebody laughs, they break out of every system that they’re in.
There’s something really subversive in laughter and in the smile on the human face. It’s lovely and infectious to be in the company of someone who can smile deeply.
I think a smile comes from the soul. And I also love its transitive kind of nature—that if you’re in the presence of someone who has a happiness and a laughter about them, it’ll affect you and it’ll call that out in you as well.
Your body relaxes completely when you’re having fun. I think one of the things that religion has often prevented us from doing is having really great fun. To be here, in a way—despite the sadness and difficulty and awkwardness of individual identity—is to be permanently invited to the festival of great laughter."
I think John O’Donohue captures it perfectly
In the face of the difficulties that we all face it is laughter and the sharing of it that helps us to stay open hearted and fully engaged. Laughter can hold us together when all around us can appear to be falling apart and it can also connect us once again when we are tempted to retreat back into ourselves. Laughter is the greatest medicine and maybe it truly is the closest thing to the grace of God.
None of us knows what the coming seasons will bring. There will be tears, but not always of sorrow, there will be joy and laughter too, if we can but stay open hearted and refuse to retreat back into those shells of self-protection. Let’s not be afraid of our tears, for there are tears of laughter too. Let’s enjoy every season for none of us know how many seasons we have left; let’s not forget, in the words of Conrad Hyers "The first and last word belong to God and therefore not to death but life, not to sorrow but joy, not to weeping but laughter. For surely it is God who has the last laugh."
Below is a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"
