LAUGHTER
Something about Frederich Buechner, whom I wrote about a few days ago, has puzzled me since. And so, for myself, I am going to wrestle a little bit with it.
Frederick Beuchner says that the phrase by the great preacher George Buttrick that changed his life was the phrase „among confession and tears, and great laughter“ Confession and tears have to do, I‘m guessing, with listening to himself, and in his case discovering the presence of Christ when he listened. Listening to yourself and whatever is out of sight that impels you through life seems to me to be worth doing whether you find Christ or Buddha or simply yourself. But tacking laughter on the end seems out of place. Listening to yourself is serious business, I agree, maybe the most serious business, although very hard to do. But why laughter?
I really don‘t know what Buechner had in mind and why it affected him so much, why was laughter the thing that grabbed him?
But all I can think of is that what we find when we listen to ourselves is sometimes so shocking that we can‘t say it out loud and sometimes so intensely wild and alive that we either dismiss it or realize that it is beyond us to actually accept. Almost all the things that Jesus suggest we do, loving our neighbor as ourselves or giving all that we have to the poor are beyond our capabilities. But so is Buddha‘s suggestion that we completely let go of our attachment to the world and achieve enlightenment through dissolving our individual identity. If the inner visceral drive, which is out of sight, impels us along by showing us extreme possibilities of being fully alive, in the everyday world where we compromise continually in order to fit in, we are going to fail. There is a terrible irony between our most alive possibilities which pull us along in the projections we follow and our actual bumbling daily life where everything that makes us feel most alive is seen through a glass darkly and we are just making our way along the best way we can. Irony is the contrast between what could be and what is. And the way we deal with our constant failure and the failure of others, which happens constantly, is to ease our awareness by finding it comic. At least that is what Buechner’s being arrested by the word laughter means to me. I am a comic figure, we are all comic figures, and our passage through life is painfully comic or comically painful. The reason, maybe, from Buechner‘s perspective that the God‘s laughter is so intense, is because the irony of our lives is so intensely painful in contrast. At the center of comedy, slipping on the banana peel, is intense pain, healed or made bearable by laughter, the greater the pain the greater the laughter.
That may or may not be what Buechner was referring to, probably not. But it is my way of making sense of his being touched by God‘s laughter when laughter at first seems so out of place.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 