Journal of Sacred Work

   After promising you that I would write each day this week about jokes and joking, I found myself stuck today. It’s difficult, especially for a non-comedian like me, to make up humor in a vacuum. Humor is the sort of thing that flows in relationship with others.
   On top of that, I’ve been feeling sorry for myself for two straight days now. The loving care movement feels like it’s moving too slowly. And there are always plenty of other things to feel sad about: Iraq, about which 70% of this country is now both dismayed and angry as well as sad; Darfur, which is a continuous veil of tears and horror; the recent deaths of nine firefighters in a furniture store disaster. There are always tragedies in the world. It’s when you’re feeling sad yourself that the world’s suffering seems even more heart-breaking and life can look hopeless.
   Then, late in the day, I remembered a funny thing that happened many years ago to a friend of mine at, of all things, a funeral…

   Rev. Ralph Shunk was a newly-minted minister at the time of the incident. And I remember how funny he was when he told the story.
   "I was officiating at a funeral of a 90-year old," Ralph told me. "It had been raining all day. As we stood at the graveside, the tearful family next to me, I had my back to the grave. Suddenly, the ground began to give way and I gradually fell backwards – all the way into the grave! As I slipped, everyone stood there looking at me like they were watching someone falling backward on a balcony – sort of paralyzed. And yes, I landed right on the casket of the dearly departed."
   I don’t know if Ralph’s fall was funny at the time. But it sure was hilarious in the retelling. When people say "you had to be there" to appreciate a story like this, they’re partly right. Yet we know that one of the universals of the human condition is the pratfall. No matter where you go in the world or what cartoon you see, the clumsy fall is sure to bring a laugh. Children as young as a year old may even laugh at such an event. But a pratfall by a minister onto a casket at a funeral is quite a combination, partly because of the sheer inappropriateness of hilarity at such a time.
   As I heard myself laughing out loud at this old story, I also felt some of my melancholy retreating for a moment. I thought, also, of the way we act as children when we’re feeling very angry and very self-righteous and some wise adult comes along to shake us out of our mood. "Come on, smile," my dad would say to my pouting six-year-old face.
   "No! I’m not going to smile," I would answer, not wanting to give up the particular energy of my self-pitying state. "Okay," he would persist smilingly, "don’t smile. Don’t smile, now. Don’t smile…" Of course, that always worked and soon I would be smiling and laughing through my tears.
   Shaking low moods is not so easy for adults. Instead of jokes, we often turn to medication for relief from chronic depression. Everyone knows that persistent low moods are deeply debilitating and counseling may be critical to successful recovery.
   But for the passing dark cloud in life, stories like Rev. Ralph Shunk’s "calamity" can bring just enough relief to stop our own decline. And this may give us the help we need to restore us to firmer ground.

-Erie Chapman