The Problem of Humor

31 10 2011

Laughter is a problem. Yes it is, don’t laugh at me. It may be a problem larger than suffering, larger than evil, larger than a moon made of fingernails, and it is a problem because of this: laughter thrives on tragedy. Someone trips, and we laugh. A cow bursts into a shopping mall, and we laugh. A black man meets a Jew on the beach, and we laugh.

“The law for the comic is very simple: the comic is wherever there is contradiction and where the contradiction is painless by being regarded as canceled,” quipped Kierkegaard, and I agree. [1] Humor is our burst of surprise before incongruity, the sonar explosion that magnifies contradiction. It is our lighthearted reaction to oddness, to things that are not the way they were supposed to be. Provided nobody is hurt and things end well, what do we laugh about? People tripping, a cow’s parade, racist prejudices: tension, incongruity, and tragedy. We laugh about things that, if they followed their logic to the end, would amount to great sadness: the person tripping and hurting himself, or the racist tension leading to conflict and humiliation.

I noticed this tragicomic dynamic of humor after watching one hilarious video. Carlo Verdone, a Roman actor, receives a phone call late at night, of someone looking for Aunt Mary. “But Aunt Mary is dead!,” he answers, cross-eyed with a pajama hat. Verdone asks the other person what message she wanted to pass on, and it was about someone’s death. Then he learns that the two sons are dead too, and the dog. Tragedy follows on tragedy until, talking about the grandpa who did not have an arm, Verdone asks the person what number did she dial. It was the wrong number, and he sighs relieved that no one is dead after all, at least no one he knows except Aunt Mary, of course.

As I finished watching this video, it struck me how the video was actually one grand tragic scene: death, suffering, mourning, disabled people. Yet it was profoundly funny. We know it was the wrong number, so we can crack up about people’s deaths. In the light of resolution, tragedy is funny. We laugh at sadness and death, because we can see hope. The good ending redeems tragedy and transforms it into comedy.

If I may risk moving to more serious matters (no, booohhh from the crowd), I think the problem of humor raises a big question for us then. What about us? What about life? It there a good ending which will cancel our tragedies? Can we laugh only at jokes and videos, and despair at our lives, or can we laugh about our destinies too? Is there hope for our litany of longings and disappointments and tragedies, or is laughter reserved only for fictitious and fantastic stories?

According to the Christian faith, there is such hope, though it is kinda like a joke too, and it is hilarious. We can call it maybe The Grand Prank. Jesus, after talking about heaven and eternity, after saying grandiose things like he is the Bread of Life, after amassing a multitude of people longing for victory and salvation, after convincing folks that he was God incarnate, and that hope had finally arrived, this Jesus, well, dies. He trips worse than the cow that falls on the black man and the Jew in the mall. And then he appears to people who came to mourn his death, like a spooky ghost haunting the cemetery. Tcharaaahhhh!!!

I mean, couldn’t Jesus ascend to the sky and pour down salvation directly? How could he let people watch him die and stay quiet, saying nothing to relieve their tears, disguising nothing of the Grand Prank, and just scare the bejesus out of them by showing up alive in the cemetery a couple of days later? Couldn’t he offer life without poking fun at death?

I believe he couldn’t, and this is what makes Jesus’ hope so serious. His prank is comic precisely because it is tragic. It is no half-hearted joke, no little girl’s bear-meets-the-panda story. Jesus can offer us life precisely because he confronted death. Out of the greatest tragedy of history emerges our possibility of laughter, the moment which can redeem our tragedy into comedy. Jesus’ hope addresses the depth of our tears; we have nothing worse than what he went through. But his hope lifts us to humor and laughter too, and in a way which does not deny suffering and death, but which redeems them.

Jesus’ hope is both tragic and comic, and that’s why I entrust myself to him, why I believe his prank saves my life, why we can laugh out loud not only at jokes but at life too. There is nothing as hilarious and life-giving as this hope, not even the black man and the Jew shouting at the cow for falling on them, and the cow who answers back blaming the Republicans. It is a hope which leaves us both crying and laughing, both with sadness and joy, both mourning death and celebrating its resolution. It is serious, not light-hearted laughter, laughter which engulfs tears and cries with joy.

René Breuel

[1] Soren Kierkegaard, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”, in Howard Hong and Edna Hong, eds., The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 236.


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Categories : The Heart of Faith

On Testimony and History

28 10 2011

In an earlier post I suggested that, when comparing different religions with Christianity, one must take seriously the centrality of the person of Jesus. That means, rather than starting with ethics or metaphysics, comparisons of Christianity should start with Christ. (Admittedly, this is not an original idea.) What this means in practice, however, is that one has to begin with history. Whatever else we may conclude about Jesus, he was also a first century Jewish man living and working in Palestine (the Roman provinces of Galilee and Judaea).

But what can we really know about Jesus? The New Testament contains four different Gospels (referred to as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John after their traditional authors), which are accounts of the life and work of Jesus, with particular interest in his ministry, and death in the early 30′s CE. (Jesus’ death is particularly important for these authors because according to them [and the earlier writer Paul as well] death was not the end for Jesus – he rose and now reigns as lord over all.)  All four are different, with different points of view on various events and controversies, though three of them are closely related and share a number of sources (though the precise connection has been debated since antiquity and doesn’t look like it’s letting up any time soon). They (or parts of them) were probably written sometime from ten years after Jesus’ death to the end of the first century or perhaps beginning of the second century CE. These facts have led some to ask, “Can we really trust these accounts of Jesus?”

I would like to suggest that we can and that the case of the gospels is not really different in principle from any other historical text. Historical events and persons are not subject to proof, i.e. they are not verifiable, in the same way that contemporary events are and certainly not in the same way that one proves a mathematical or scientific hypothesis. But even contemporary events are difficult to understand. If three people witness the same event, say, a convenience store robbery, it is unlikely that their descriptions will be the same. Each has their own point of view, and it is further affected by their relationship to, in our example, the robber: the store owner’s account would likely be very different from the account of the doting mother who happened to be there. In reconstructing the event, the police rely on human testimony (even alongside such fancy technology as a security camera) to understand what happened.

Working with events and persons in history is even more complicated than that, but the crux remains the same: do you trust the one giving the testimony? If not, then it is unlikely that even a very plausible event would be accepted. If so, then even some difficulties in the testimony might be allowed within the limits of that trust. But all history, and indeed most knowledge about anything, is based on one sort of testimony or another. The historian’s job is to weigh the various accounts of an event and decide what is coherent and what does not fit.[1] The Gospels (along with the whole New Testament) testify that Jesus was more than he seemed. He was the Messiah of the Jews, who was also the very presence of God among his people. This Jesus, as Paul testifies with the Gospels, “died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”[2]

This is what they testify. The question is, do you trust them?

Ben Edsall
______________________
[1] Of course, we bring our own presuppositions to the table too, but that is a matter for a different post.
[2] 1 Corinthians 15:3-4


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Categories : Tough Questions

Van Gogh’s Death: Post-Impressions

26 10 2011

A new book about the famous Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh is taking the art world by storm. As seen this month on 60 Minutes, Pulitzer Prize- winning authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith have written a comprehensive 976-page biography of the Dutch painter whose works now sell for many millions of dollars.[1] Beyond the painstaking research and meticulous scholarship evident in their work, what’s most surprising and controversial about Van Gogh: The Life is its suggestion that van Gogh did not commit suicide as previously believed. Though this has been the view for the last 121 years, Naifeh and Smith argue that van Gogh died at the hands of two mischievous Parisian teenagers who, after spending much of their summer ridiculing the eccentric and life-wearied artist, acquired a revolver and misfired a bullet into his chest.

Of course, without a time machine, no one will ever really know how van Gogh died, but the facts about his life up until that fateful moment are well documented. He grew up interested in art and God, but his teachers and ministers shunned him for his unconventional habits. He had a love interest and desired fellowship with others, but he was rejected and had very few friends. A constant wanderer, deep thinker, and prolific letter writer, van Gogh also suffered from bouts of mental illness and sliced off part of his ear. His paintings reveal that he saw majestic beauty in nature as well as in ordinary people. But in the end, he died a relatively obscure, unappreciated artist wanting to ease the financial burdens of his brother Theo, who had been commissioning Vincent’s unsuccessful artwork for a good portion of his life.

For my own part in the Christian tradition, much of this bears striking resemblance to what happened to Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus too was rejected by the religious authorities of his day, alienated by close friends, and mocked by those who killed him. He had a deep appreciation for nature and craved committed personal relationships despite the betrayal and alienation he felt from some of his closest friends.

Of course, mysteries swirl around Jesus just as they now do for van Gogh, but note what their deaths have in common. On the cross, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”[2] Here, at the height of his persecution and anguish, Jesus evidently was praying for others, hoping to ease their burdens, even as he lay dying for them. For van Gogh, it is reported that when asked by the police whether he shot himself, he strangely answered, “I believe so. Don’t accuse anybody else… It is I who wanted to kill myself.”[3] Are these the words of two suicidal maniacs, or do they reveal far nobler, more forgiving spirits than we ever realized? For Jesus and now for van Gogh, perhaps we ought to rethink our first impressions and form new, post-impressions.

Paul McClure

[2] Luke 23:34

[3] http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/lifestyle/10/19/11/new-book-says-van-goghs-death-was-killing-not-suicide


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Don’t Take Your Religion So Seriously!

24 10 2011

A recent review of American Grace, a sociological study of religion in America, came to the conclusion that in an ethnically and ideologically diverse culture where religion is increasingly seen as a matter of personal preference as opposed to fixed identity, our survival as nations and citizens depends upon the following maxim: “Don’t take your religion too seriously.” Intense, sectarian devotion is dangerous and suspicious. Peace and harmony in the twenty-first century depend upon adopting a “bland is beautiful” approach to religion.

Better yet, why not just stop caring about religion at all? Canadian journalist Neil MacDonald coined the term “apatheism” to get at the idea that given the political reality in the USA (and Canada), apathy toward the divine is the best approach:

I have no religious beliefs.  None…. There’s a better word for what I am: an apatheist.  It’s a neologism that fuses “apathy” and “theism.” It means someone who has absolutely no interest in the question of a god’s (or gods’) existence, and is just as uninterested in telling anyone else what to believe.

Well that certainly sounds tolerant and politically astute, not to mention admirably humble. MacDonald simply doesn’t know and doesn’t care if God exists and wouldn’t it be great if everyone else could just find it within themselves to adopt “apatheism” as a way of approaching questions that we can’t be certain about or agree upon?

Yet is “apatheism” even coherent?  Does MacDonald really have no interest in telling anyone else what to believe?  Presumably he might have a thing or two to say to those who are interested in telling others what to believe or how to live.  Presumably his apathy would become a bit more strained if, say, those convinced that God has commanded them to act violently toward those who do not share their beliefs begin to threaten his nation or his person. “Apatheism” seems like an approach that could only work in a very specific set of cultural circumstances and parameters.

MacDonald “apatheism” simply turns a political strategy into a more explicit worldview pronouncement. While he lives and works in America, MacDonald’s home and native land (Canada) has officially advocated “multiculturalism” as a political strategy since 1971. In order for multiculturalism to work “on the ground,” the government has to bracket the question of whether or not any one culture or religion has access to some kind of singular “truth.”  All are granted political liberty to practice how they see fit (within limits); all religious claims are relegated to the realm of “things you can believe if you want to as long as they stay mostly private and aren’t socially/politically disruptive.” At a political level, this is necessary to allow people of radically different views on (what they seem to consider to be) important matters to exist in the same space peacefully.

MacDonald just turns this into a worldview. “Apatheism” is “why can’t we all just agree not to care about god(s) so much” writ large. What MacDonald seems to mean when he says he is an “apatheist” is that he is apathetic about the question of whether or not a private God who meets individual psychological needs and makes no difference in public life exists, and will continue to tolerantly, if condescendingly, allow others to believe in whatever publicly irrelevant god they happen to prefer.

In a sense, MacDonald’s apatheistim is a logical outcome of spying some of the limits of multiculturalism as a political strategy. Forty years into the Canadian multicultural experiment, some are seeing potential hazards. Can a nation that allows people of radically different beliefs to live together really survive and thrive? Are there some worldviews that cannot be accommodated into the “official” Canadian metanarrative of peace and tolerance and “niceness?”  What happens when worldviews simply prove fundamentally incompatible, politically and ideologically?

MacDonald and, to a lesser extent, the writers of American Grace offer one response: Just stop caring so much. Adopt a worldview of apathy about the divisive questions like whether or not God exists. Yet apathy and (limited) tolerance as a worldview seems unlikely to inspire broad allegiance as a framing story. Aside from its obviously limited value in addressing some of the deep existential needs of humanity—needs for hope, forgiveness, reconciliation, and salvation, among other things—having no interest in the beliefs of others only works if the beliefs of others make no difference in the world.

Ryan Dueck


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

The X-Factor: Don’t have it, don’t need it

21 10 2011

Have you got the X-Factor?  Plenty of people believe they do, lining up in their thousands to audition, but only one can win. Sony Records won’t be disappointed to hear that I’m staying home. I don’t have the X-Factor. I barely have confidence to hum on the tube, never mind sing live to an audience of millions. “You’ve got to really really want this” say the judges to the musical hopefuls looking like rabbits in headlights on stage. Want what?, I want to ask.  Fame?   Money?  To make music?…  If it was all about the music, there’d be buskers on every street corner.  More often it seems to appear that the thing these hopefuls most crave is recognition and approval on a grand scale.  Everything hangs on this competition.

I’d love to tell them something different.  But what?  Christian ideals such as selflessness, humility, putting others first, may not seem like an appealing alternative to global recognition and a recording contract.  But there’s more to Christianity than sackcloth and ashes.  Each one of us may not be born to perform, but, being made in the image of a creative God, we are certainly born to create, and music is one of the most obviously creative things to do.

Do the thing that gives you life and joy, I might say.  But what about fame, recognition, adulation?  Surprisingly, Christianity offers these too, on an even larger scale but on completely different terms.  Want to be someone?  God knew you before you were born (Ps. 139:16).  Want to feel special?  You are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Ps. 139:14).  Want to be adored?  God’s love for you is insurmountable and unconditional.

Quite simply, there is no competition for God’s love.  To win ‘X-Factor,’ you earn praise and stand alone, but God’s love is completely unearned and is lavished on losers and winners alike.  The highest love on the grandest scale is available to all but only we can decide if it’s what we really want.

Madi Simpson


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Why Jesus Won’t Heal ‘Disabilities’

19 10 2011

“Dude, you severed my finger.” Sadly it was true. Anthony and I were moving heavy logs, in preparation for a youth camp—kumbuyah round the camp-fire. “1-2-and … STOP!”—and like that his arm locked, I dropped, and the finger lopped. Doh. First came the shock. Then came the accusations: “What about my music career?” Anthony was a talented saxophonist, headed for the music conservatorium. I’m not into brass, but I gather missing a digit makes it difficult to dance over the spatula keys reciting John Coltrane’s ‘Round Midnight’. Anthony was now ‘disabled’.

Jesus’ promises came to mind: “Believe and you’ll receive; ask and it will be given; nothing is impossible.”[1] So like faithful disciples, we drew close, joined hands, and squeezed our eyes shut like Dorothy hoping for Kansas. We prayed, and … well, suffice to say, minutes later we were groping around the dirt for the missing member, carting Anthony and his detached bit off to hospital.

Marshall Brain, the author of whywontgodhealamputees.com, wouldn’t be surprised. His argument is simple. God’s powerful, right? And we know God through Jesus, the guy who supposedly cared for the hurting and went around healing the sick. Jesus then promises us these same powers, in response to prayer. And yet … form a prayer chain of millions and the disability remains. This loving God never regenerates lost limbs—the one non-ambiguous, empirical case of healing which couldn’t be psycho-somatic or coincidental. Two binary conclusions are offered: 1) God has a grudge against amputees; or 2) God is imaginary and therefore doesn’t heal anyone: amputees are no different.

For all his brains, I’m confused how Michael moved from “Jesus healed everyone except amputees” to “Jesus never healed anyone—past or present—as God doesn’t exist.” And a skim of the Scriptures highlights that Jesus did heal amputees, i.e., lepers and the ‘maimed’. Scour the web and you’ll find countless responses to his second contention.[2] But what of the first contention? What of Anthony?

Healing amputees is a subset of any regeneration, so let’s broaden the accusation to God’s grudge against anyone with a physical disability. As Brain notes, “if someone is born with a congenital defect … no amount of prayer is going to fix the problem.” Yet ‘disability’ is a knotty and complex issue. Do all ‘disabilities’ need to be healed? Perhaps Jesus had good reasons for not healing Anthony?

Humour me. Take a few minutes and read John 9. Granted, Jesus heals this guy. But perhaps you’ll see here a subtext for why Jesus won’t heal disabilities.

You may know this story well. It’s the one about the man blind from birth—let’s call him Ben—who Jesus unconventionally heals by rubbing spit and clay into his eyes! And then there’s a saga before the empirical doubters—in this case religious rulers—who refuse to believe Ben was really healed. They interrogate this man, his parents, and then the man again before excommunicating him from their club. It’s worth a fresh look if our spiritual eyes are to regenerate and see the deepest disability of all.

A few quick observations: First, Jesus ‘saw’ the man who was blind, not for his disability, but for his personhood (v1). Ben wasn’t a data point in a sceptic’s set, nor was he a theological conundrum for religious apologists. Jesus truly saw Ben, and loved Him. The imago Dei isn’t an ability or function, but an identity as a child of God, created and loved by the Father, thus worthy of respect. Contra-Descartes, “I love (and am loved) therefore I am.”

Second, Ben’s blindness definitely was a disability, as he lacked the love of community to offer friendship and meaningful activity that might otherwise make his life ‘normal’. As theologian Amos Yong points out, “disability is … the experience of discrimination, marginalization, and exclusion from the social, cultural, political, and economic domains of human life.”[3] Not surprisingly, then, Jesus embraces Ben after he is excluded from the Temple, and draws him into community (vv34-38).

Third, Jesus redefines ‘disability’ at a deeper level. In verses 39-41, he exposes the pride of the empiricists: “I came to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind.” What is ‘blindness’ or ‘disability’? Perhaps what we call ‘ability’ is actually our pride magnifying “some able-bodied ideal of perfection”?[4] Perhaps what we call ‘disability’ is actually the glory of God in veiled form.[5] Do we have eyes to see that every ‘disability’—whether congenital blindness or an amputated limb—is less a challenge to our faith and God’s existence, and more an opportunity allowed by God in this fallen world for us to become family, where each member loves and is loved?

Isn’t this God’s way? Jesus Christ is the ‘disabled God’. It was through the deformities of his body, paralysed on the cross, that he brought peace and salvation for the whole world. And even in his ‘resurrection body’, sceptical Thomas can still probe Jesus’ scars. In the mystery of God, the non-disabled are dependent on the disabled, whom God has chosen to be a means of saving grace. In this light I see why, many times, Jesus won’t heal disabilities. God made us to be one. And many times ‘disability’ dissolves when we recognise “their central roles both in the communion of saints and in the divine scheme of things.”[6]

So, while Jesus regenerated Ben’s eyes, my mate’s finger went begging. Granted, I wanted him to recreate Anthony’s pointer like Malchus’s severed ear.[7] But Jesus has good reasons why he won’t heal disability, and it’s not because God doesn’t exist. Ultimately, God will set everything right, and this new creation rushes forward to greet us when least expected. But right now, in the miracle of loving community, together we’ve discovered that “God’s grace is all we need; His power works best in weakness.”[8] And for all of us, including Anthony, that is the most soul-full song there is.

Dave Benson

[1] Matthew 7:7; 17:20; 18:19; 21:21; Mark 11:24; John 14:14.

[2] See here for further responses. Concerning ‘miracles’ see here.

[3] Theology and Down Syndrome (Baylor, 2007), 162.

[4] Ibid., 282.

[5] 2 Corinthians 4:3-12.

[6] Yong, 188, 282.

[7] Luke 22:50-51.

[8] 2 Corinthians 12:5-10.


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Categories : Making a Difference, On Anything and Everything, Spirituality for the Rest of Us, The Heart of Faith, Tough Questions

Infectious Motivation

17 10 2011

Around 362 A.D., at some fancy palace dressed in marble, Emperor Julian was fuming. Julian was the last of Rome’s pagan emperors, and he led one last effort to revive pagan religious practices which were withering in a world turning Christian. Devotion to Caesar and to the pantheon gods was being replaced by devotion to a rebel crucified a few centuries back in an obscure corner of the empire. How dared they?

Julian focused on the building of charities, believing that moral character was the secret behind Christian efforts. Indeed, when calamitous plagues decimated millions of people throughout the Roman Empire, Christians headed relief efforts to take care of the sick and dying in a context which virtually lacked social services. Thus Julian complained that “when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the [pagan] priests, the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence.” Their shrewdness was so great, in Julian’s eyes, that they even “support not only their poor, but ours as well, everyone can see that our people lack aid from us.”[1]

But Julian’s efforts failed. It is not simple, after all, to summon multitudes of people to start caring for strangers, even sick ones, even dying ones, when the disease was infectious and many who cared for the dying ended switching places with them, dying in their stead, and freeing the sick to go live again.  As historian Rodney Stark concludes, Julian’s mission missed its core component: “Paganism had failed to develop the kind of voluntary system of good works that Christians had been constructing for more than three centuries; moreover, paganism lacked the religious ideas that would have made such organized efforts plausible.”[2]

In other words, Julian’s state-enforced organization lacked the core beliefs needed to mobilize people for costly self-giving. Why should someone care for a stranger while the world was collapsing under a plague and one could be a victim of his own care of others? That enigma has been, of course, the frustration of every government since Julian, for people’s time and arms can be bought with a pay check, but not their hearts. Pure altruism can only be genuine.

But the humble folks from Galilee had a motivation no one else had. Those simple peasants and artisans and widows and slaves had received a moral injection that transformed their outlook on life. Their God had died in their stead. He had accepted wounds which were not his own, crucifixion nails that drove in the weight of the sins of the world, so they could now go live again. They were survivors of a trade-off, people with a story to tell and a sacrifice to emulate. Love of strangers was costly, but someone had already given himself for them.

[1] Julian, quoted in Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 84.

[2] Ibid., 189.


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Categories : The Heart of Faith

Hopeful Dissatisfaction

14 10 2011

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer has recently been elected the recipient of the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Stockholm in 1931 and published his first collection of poems at age 23. In 1990 he suffered a stroke and ever since he has been unable to speak. His prolific work has been translated to over 50 languages and was described by the Nobel committee as able to craft “condensed, translucent images” which “gives us fresh access to reality.” [1]

On the day that Tranströmer was announced as winner, the book I happened to be reading was Confessions, by Augustine. I mention this for a reason: if the Nobel Prize for Literature was already being given in the 5th century, I believe Augustine would possibly have received it for his writing.

More than a hundred titles are accredited to Augustine. The most well known, Confessions, was written between 397 and 398. It has been described as the first Western autobiography and has been widely acclaimed across the centuries by its innovative style and depth of content.

The Confessions’ most popular lines are probably “(…) you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” [2] I wonder what you think about these words that Augustine utters to God.

In my view, he speaks of what I’d portray as a hopeful dissatisfaction. He refers to the human condition in which our beings seek what they naturally do not have: true rest. For this reason it’s a dissatisfaction. But Augustine also affirms that the existential rest we long for can be found in God. So it’s hopeful.

Augustine’s words echo a common biblical theme. In the Old Testament we read: “For He has satisfied the thirsty soul, and the hungry soul He has filled with what is good.” [3] In the New Testament, we find Jesus himself affirming this reality in numerous occasions. A couple of examples are: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” [4] And “if anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink.” [5]

The Christian view, therefore, recognizes that we’re not entirely ourselves until we’re reconnected to our creator. We’re not totally rested, until we rest in him. We’ll never be fully satisfied, until we’re fully joined with him. There’s hope to the human dissatisfaction, the Bible insists.

C. S. Lewis, the renowned Oxford professor and author of the “Chronicles of Narnia”, resonated with the biblical idea and Augustine’s words when writing: “if I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” [6]

No success, wealth, relationship, intellectualism or even Nobel Prizes will eradicate our discontent, for “you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” [7]

Hélder Favarin

[1] “The Nobel Prize in Literature 2011 – Press Release”. Nobelprize.org. 10 Oct 2011. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2011/press.html

[2]  Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1

[3] Psalm 107:9

[4] Matthew 11:28

[5] John 7:37

[6]  C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

[7]  Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1


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Categories : Spirituality for the Rest of Us

“Is This Real Life?”

12 10 2011

At the moment, over 70 million viewers have tuned in to YouTube to watch the wacky antics of a kid named David who has just left the dentist. Aside from the fact that I waste too much time surfing the Web for comedic nuggets such as this, David’s drug-induced musings say a lot about our world. First, we identify with David because, just like him, we
 often find ourselves confronting a scary and confusing world that prompts us to ask questions such as “Is this real life?” or “Why is this happening to me?”  Second, when faced with the brutal reality of the world, we usually look for an escape, a glimmer of hope, or maybe just a funny YouTube video that can keep us distracted from hard and serious labor.

Recently I came across a book that helps make sense of our need for laughter and what this tells us about the world we encounter. The esteemed Austrian-American sociologist and Lutheran theologian Peter Berger, in his insightful and frequently funny work entitled Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience, argues that humor is not only a universal, anthropological necessity but also “a signal of transcendence” and ultimately “a promise of redemption.”[2]

But is this a stretch? What have Christians had to say about laughter, and what does the Christian worldview really have to offer on the subject of humor and our apparent need for it?

Admittedly, there have been many serious-minded and quite unfunny Christians. One of Nietzsche’s many criticisms of Christianity was that its adherents always looked so depressed and unredeemed, and as Berger notes, with some exceptions, “One does not have to be a Nietzschean to look upon the history of Christian theology as a depressingly lachrymose affair.”[3] At the same time, not every Christian needs to act like the unflinching optimist Ned Flanders from The Simpsons. The world is noticeably full of sin and suffering, and Christians are affected by it just like everyone else.

Nonetheless, the Gospel offers a vision of reality drenched with dramatic irony and scandalous humor. Take, for example, the central Christian tenet that the Creator of the universe took on human flesh only to be born in a stable next to barnyard animals.[4] Did God forget to remind Joseph and Mary that they needed to make a reservation at the inn? Or maybe Jesus, prior to the virgin birth, left his confirmation number back at home, outside of the space-time continuum. Then there is the account of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, where in a manner typical of a medieval court jester, Jesus clumsily rides in on an ass.[5] Here, again, we have at once a number of very ironic events and historic Christian beliefs: the Redeemer of the world shuns all pomp and circumstance, undergoes a humiliating trial and execution, and then surprises everyone with His glorious resurrection three days later. Certainly, this has to be the greatest prank anyone ever pulled.

In the end, the Gospel is captivating because it acknowledges the tragedy of the human condition and promises to heal us eternally. The fact that we can be healed eternally despite our serious physical, emotional, and spiritual imperfections is also seriously funny, and as God breaks into the bleakness of human history to do this healing, Christians are all the wiser for embracing the joy and laughter that are part and parcel of a redeemed life. We’ve all heard the expression that laughter is the best medicine, and maybe we should realize that being a Christian means that the Doctor has prescribed laughter as an integral part of our redemption. We are, then, free to laugh and remember that, “It’s okay, bud, it’s just from the medicine!”

Paul McClure is a World Religions and Ethics teacher at Episcopal High School in Houston, TX (USA).  

[1] “David after Dentist.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs

[2] Berger, Peter L. Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience. (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 1997). 205, x.

[3] Ibid, 197-198.

[4] Luke 2:1-4

[5] Matthew 21:1-11; Mark 11:1-11; Luke 19:28-41


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Categories : The Heart of Faith

iFreedom

10 10 2011

I remember it vividly, as if I had heard those words today, even if two years have already passed.

I was in a car with the band of an Italian singer and one of them asked me: “Enzo, are you in the truth or in untruth?” I didn’t get what he wanted to say, but it seemed to have nothing to do with God. “Do you have a Mac or a PC?”, he finally asked. I laughed, and  he told me musicians simply can’t live without their Mac.

Last week one of the most brilliant minds of the past century died: Steve Jobs. All around the planet people talk about him: Twitter, blogs, Facebook, offices, television, radio, squares… everybody talks of “the genius” and what he created in the past years. One sentence that struck me went like, “seldom is there someone with the profound impact that Steve had; the consequences of his work will be felt for generations.” In many ways this is true: millions of people around the world have changed the way they work, think and communicate thanks to Jobs’ intuitions, including me. Every year there was a new idea or event that would change a small facet of our lives.

Yet listening to all these eulogies and all the celebrations of Apple-introduced changes, I can’t but think about things that are unchangeable, which all of us face. Even the man who invented the first personal computer with windows and mouse, or who changed the way we think about phones, had to think about the big questions of life, about fate and love and death and meaning. One day we will all be remembered some way, and more about who we were than what we’ve done or invented. If not in a musicians car, Jobs, like all of us, still had to ask at some point: am I in the truth?

And what does it mean to be in the truth? To have an iPhone, iPod or iMac?In an often-quoted passage, Jesus linked truth to something curious: freedom. To know the truth sets us free. I have often thought that my Mac is the staple of my freedom: freedom from Microsoft’s dominance, freedom from the crushing claws of capitalism, freedom to be creative and hip and cool. Yet, even as I cherish my beautiful Mac, and marvel at all the nice graphics it lets me see, I realize that well… it does not set me free. Maybe my iFreedom  comes from something else, from something that transcends computers and the grave, something unchangeable that sets us free to change the world.

Enzo Bifano


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Categories : On Anything and Everything

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