My 96-year-old grandmother recently gave the wise advice on an across-the-pond phone call that laughing is as good as taking a holiday. I’ve been mourning the lack of a proper holiday in my long winter, but she might be right. Maybe a holiday isn’t what I need. I’ve realized I don’t laugh nearly as hard or as much as I ought, though I smile like an American – I smile at everything. Sometimes I smile even when I’m mad.
When was the last time you laughed so hard it made your sides hurt? The last time you laughed so hard you cried?
Last night, my friend and I howled at a time-travel show that wasn’t actually that funny but just down-right confusing. Maybe the old gentleman is actually the son of the young lady who ended up in the early 2000s although she conceived him with a guy in the 1920s. Or, maybe the swarthy young man is the villain, once heroic but pulled to the dark side like a Turkish take on Darth Vader. Our heads were spinning, not because of one beer, but from the alternative endings we had spun at one in the morning. By the end, we were doubled over at the impossibility of it all.
Sometimes mirth feels like an impossibility. It feels like an impossibility when the city is tirelessly grey. It feels like an impossibility when a skiing resort killed eighty people last week, my coworkers’ relatives counted among the dead. And, the most mirthless part of it all is that all of it could have been prevented by upper-middle class buildings actually being built to code – basics like fire alarms and sprinklers. Mirth feels like an impossibility when friends cheat on their partners, when colleagues receive unfair treatment, and when the economic situation makes it hard for people to maintain their rent payments.
But, being people of mirth is what inspires us to move forward. And, while there is a myriad of things we can’t laugh at, perhaps we should start seeking more in earnest for the moments in which we can laugh. It’s not that we should fabricate laughter – cheap, fake laughter that’s a fraud just like the “genuine Turkish carpets” sold for a song. One of the people in my life who most consistently makes me laugh said once, looking around a room at a New Year’s Party, “This is why I love alcohol. Everyone loosens up.” And, honestly, it made me sad right then and there. Have Christians fallen so short in showing our friends what pure mirth can look like? Instead, we’ve created for ourselves a reputation of seriousness – or “dull” fun.
I wouldn’t say I’m a particularly serious person. In fact, the last time I visited a close friend from my university stomping grounds in the United States, we had a “kid day” – two partially-grown adults feeling nostalgic about the days consisting just of play. We colored Disney princesses at a coffee shop, rolled down a grassy hill, drew an elaborate hop-scotch in chalk and blew bubbles, swung on a playground, got ice cream cones, and ate dino nuggets for dinner as we watched “Princess Diaries” inside a giant blanket fort of our own making. I need another one of those kid days to remind me how to play. Of course play doesn’t have to look like that – I get it, not everyone wants to have a picnic lunch of pop tarts, Cheetos, and juice boxes – but I wonder if one of the gravest mistakes we’ve made as Christ-followers is to relegate play solely to children. We’ve made faith serious business. I, for one, find myself increasingly connected to liturgical traditions, which encourage solemnity and prayerful contemplation. But, as with so many things, we ignore the possibility of the both/and.
Amidst 21st century distractions, many in the secular realm have clutched more closely to play than Christians, including everyone from the infant to the elderly. Recently, while poking around in the writings of the enchanted, I discovered this thread. In Katherine May’s book Enchanment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age, May doesn’t stop with kids when she encourages us not to be sanitized out of play. She endorses play for all:
"[Deep play] captures, for me, a quality of attention that is unexpected in adult life, and which we barely even recognise in children. That’s because we misunderstand play itself, casting it as exuberant, silly, a frippery that signals to us that our children are still young enough to have not yet turned their minds to more weighty endeavors…But play is serious. Play is absolute. Play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you…We all find our play in different places, after all. Some of us in the search for follies, some of us in the stories they suggest. What matters is that we play at all, that we nurture that particular quality of attention, that we keep up the dialogue between our play and others’." (p. 96-97, p. 103)
Of course, there’s much to be wary of amidst new-age spirituality. But, what interests me in secular thought are the seeds of truth, since good and right principles undergird much of what’s misdirected. I’m inspired by the contemporary challenge for adults to return to play, both individually and collectively. The enchanted don’t long for the Giver of common graces, but they do set out to enjoy them better than many. Instead of viewing play as frivolous and unproductive – “go and play” we tell our kids to keep them out of trouble – we might do right to alter our view of play to enable us to better participate in the creative, imaginative, mirthful side of God… we might do right to return to mirth.
Now, that I’m far removed from that kid day on a merry-go-round in Cooledge Park, in a city that’s chaotic and troubled, perhaps this is my plea to join me in considering: when is the last time you laughed, and how can we practically keep that laughter ringing? How can we be Christ-followers who are radical because of the way we laugh? Because, in this broken world, perhaps there is little more radical than that?