Lighten Up
Stratford Caldecott

 

Descartes was asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. "I think not," he replied - and disappeared.

The telling of jokes is an ancient art, and the secret of success lies in the way you tell them. You probably didn’t laugh at that one, because I failed to set the scene by reminding you of the famous Cartesian dictum, "I think therefore I am". Many a famous comedian sends out a lesser act to warm up the audience before stepping onto the stage. There are moments in the Bible that have always struck me as supremely comic (see Gen. 18:20-32), but I have never seen a congregation crack up when these passages are intoned in church. In part, of course, the problem is that "we have heard that one before" : but did we laugh the first time? Should we?

G.K. Chesterton brought his famous book Orthodoxy to a conclusion with some of the greatest lines on humour written by a Christian. "Christianity," he writes, "satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small." Joy he calls "the gigantic secret of the Christian": secret because the "tremendous levities of the angels" and the "laughter of the heavens" would overwhelm us in our present state. Jesus restrained the exercise of his divine power whilst on earth, and permitted it only to shine through at moments. The same is true of his mirth. He was not a clown, a joker, a covorting trickster.

Nevertheless, humour, light-heartedness, wit, irony and satire have a vital place and are woven through the Gospels. Humour is an essential dimension of being human, and Jesus was "true man". We should, indeed, not take ourselves - or the Devil - too seriously. In the life of prayer, we often find that God himself plays tricks on us, makes jokes with us. But this is part of the spiritual life not easily spoken of to others, for these jokes are personal to us and cannot be understood out of their context. They have a vital function: by playing with us, God reminds us that we are his children. To become "the right way up", we have to turn the world on its head. The Christian is supposed to grow younger, not older, with the passing of time.

Christmas is the season of the Star, of the Light that shines in the darkness, the light followed by the Wise and feared by Herod:

Go humbly... it has hailed and snowed...
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
(...We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone...)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

G.K. Chesterton, The Wise Men

This piece appeared in the ‘Second Spring’ section of Catholic World Report, December 1995