Why So Serious?
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Reviews on Saturday, February 12, 2011 10:00 AM
I thought of Lisa’s post about cyber-nastiness this morning while reading A Right to Be Merry,
I’ve long loved Chesterton’s remark that angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly—and I suspect that the nastiness in comment boxes—and on the floor of the House, too—could be improved if we took ourselves less seriously.
The loss of faith has drained genuine humor from life.
There’s plenty of mockery, which is distinct. Genuine humor springs from confidence that in the end, God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world. But I’ll let Mother Mary Francis say it:
Many persons, perhaps even most, feel that if a girl has a sense of humor, she had better unpack it at the enclosure door.
Actually, a sense of humor is vitally important in the cloister. Without it, the enclosure can easily become a spiritual hothouse, where every trifle marks a crisis and pettiness grows into a cult. A sense of humor is like a sweet, clean wind sweeping through our enclosed lives and purifying the small details of them.
That’s true of family life, too, isn’t it? She goes on:
The term “sense of humor” has lost much of its fundamental significance in these tortured times of ours, even to the extent that it is often vaguely thought to be associated with telling jokes and laughing at them. In point of fact, it is a thing rooted in the Divine, for a real sense of humor is what balances the mysteries of joy and sorrow.
Without it, we can never hold a true perspective on ourselves or others. The saints were the true humorists. The better poets were humorists. The ability to see through things and to know what is important and what is not, what is to be endured and why we endure it, what is to be tolerated out of compassion and what is to be extirpated out of duty, is dependent on one’s sense of humor. Without the one, we cannot possess the other.
This image made me laugh. I think it applies to marriages and comment boxes—and not only females—as well!
A group of dour females with their jaws set grimly for “perfection” and their nerves forever in a jangle would turn a cloister into a psychopathic ward. The joyous, high-spirited girl with a feeling for the splendid sense of things and the delicious nonsense of things is the one most likely to persevere in the enclosure.
Mother’s wise spiritual director’s parting words to her when she entered the cloister? “Just don’t lose your funny bone.”
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