Laughing at Ourselves

[I began my blog last year at this time. Thinking that you may have subscribed within the last nine months I thought I would repost one of my early entries in case you missed it. Here it is.]

When I awakened from surgery, my wife and adult children were there to greet me. Following a round of gentle hugs (my sternum had been cut down the middle and my rib cage pried open so that the surgeon could get at my heart: I was pretty tender), our son asked,

“So what are you looking forward to now that you’ve gotten through this.”

One of the six tubes coming from my body ran through my nose and down my throat, so I had to spell out my answer, drawing on my chest with my right index finger. They repeated each letter as I wrote:

L . . . O . . . T . . . S

“Lots,” they all said.

I nodded and continued. O . . . F

“Lots of,” they all said.

I nodded again and pressed on: S

“S”

Nod. E

“E”

Another nod.

When I scrawled the X across my chest, our daughter shrieked, my wife rolled her eyes, and after a moment of silence, our son chuckled: “Dad’s back.”

Moral of the story: Laugh at yourself.

By this I don’t mean to ridicule yourself. I mean, don’t take yourself too seriously.

I learned this lesson from my father. Dad was an able and intelligent man. Voted “class grind” in high school, he had gone on to Harvard. He read widely, and all the time. But he was also silly. He made us laugh, mostly at himself. This made him safe to be with. Home was never scary for us.

In that safe place I discovered that it is OK—anti-delusional in fact—to keep ourselves out of the center of things. We are loved, but we are not God’s gift to the world. We are significant, with tasks to do, but we are not the solution to everything, or even to any one thing.

Dad taught me something else. Without consciously aiming at it he gave me a picture of the God I have come to believe in—the God who came down to help us laugh again.

One of the first things Jesus did was to turn water into wine—really tasty wine and lots of it. He turned a fading wedding party into an enormous success with a good bit of wine-enhanced merriment. Like Dad, he made people laugh.

I feel odd suggesting a parallel between my father’s self-deprecating silliness and God’s enhancement of merriment at a wedding. I am not comfortable, for one thing, picturing God as silly. But there, nevertheless, is a parallel. For not too long after that wedding God actually made himself the brunt of a vicious joke—a naked, pain-wracked, and publicly humiliated criminal. As he died, people made fun of him.

The parallel continues, if the Christian story is to be believed. For the aim of Dad’s silliness was the same as God’s: to make it safe to be with him. This, it seems to me, is why Jesus’ first sign was at a wedding.