Radical Spirit

by Joan Chittister

  Interestingly enough, I discovered, the history of laughter in societies and religion is a rich one. No novice director had ever traced the relationship for us, but the association was very clear.

  Indeed, laughter had a great deal to do with the early disquisitions on humility. Yet over the centuries, the meanings attributed to laughter came to be understood differently. In later cultures, the subject remained just as important as ever but with more spiritual, sometimes even mystical, overtones.

  Clement of Alexandria, the first Christian theologian to treat the subject of laughter, was not so much intent on eliminating laughter—which had long been the basis of satire and religious mockery in Rome—but to constrain it. He was committed to the notion that reason ought to dominate the emotions but that laughter disturbed reason. Laughter, he argued, is an outburst that violates rational communication. Even smiling, he taught, had to be bridled.

  The ongoing teaching for centuries thereafter took the position that excessive laughter is a sign of a weak and undisciplined character. It undermined human dignity, the theologians argued. The early leaders of the Church, to a man, inveighed against it. Ambrose, Jerome, Basil, and John Chrysostom—who pointed out that Jesus never laughed—all of them considered laughter the anteroom to lust. Laughter, they said, was centered in the body, polluted the soul, and so crowded out the Word of God.

  Tradition had spoken clearly: Laughter was a first step on the road to eternal doom. And chief among all conclusions was the notion that monks and hermits, above all, were to weep over the miseries of the world and concentrate on the suffering and death of Jesus. Not spend their lives in inane laughter. One religious Rule after another warned against the role of laughter in distracting the religious from the important things of life.

  The teaching was well established long years before Benedictine religious life appeared on the scene. Christianity had already conquered the “eat, drink, and be merry” philosophy of the Roman Empire. Life now was about salvation, not sensuality, not “bread and circuses.” Five centuries before the Rule of Benedict, rigorous rationality had already put down deep roots.

  In the thirteenth century, however, Thomas Aquinas began to interpret games and mirth and even John Chrysostom’s teachings on laughter differently. Then, in the fifteenth century, the philosopher-priest Marsilio Ficino pronounced laughter to be “gracious.” It was a clear break with tradition on the subject and signaled an entirely new approach.

  Finally, with the later recognition of the positive value of the human body, a new conversation began on the necessary role of laughter, propriety, beauty, and Divine Joy. These medical and psychological insights changed the trajectory of human development and continues to this day.

  In fact, laughter, in our time, has become big business. There are claims aplenty made for it at the highest levels of medical and scientific research. Emphasis on laughter’s place is now a firmly established meme in the quality of human relationships, social bonding, emotional health, stress reduction, and physical health. The pictures of our grandparents—he seated, she standing behind him, both of them stern-faced and unsmiling—have given way to laughing women and rollicking men whose laughter comes off the pages of our photograph albums in waves.

  So, now? What now for us and our generation, and especially for our spirituality? Has the tenth step of humility been declared defunct? Is there any use or meaning to it? Can it possibly be an adequate bearer of so great a spiritual concept as humility?

  The answer to all those slivers of the problem is a simple one: It all depends on what kind of laughter you’re talking about. The laughter considered irrational that focused the first fifteen centuries of this spirituality? Or the kind of laughter that has to do with scorn and derision, with disdain and disparagement, which also borders on the irrational, that is so much a part of our own experience?

  In this century, laughter is not a universal sign of lust or a loss of rationality. And yet, the way laughter is used as a weapon now can be far worse. Candidates can get elected to high public office by hurling verbal insults at their competition in the hope of reaping a harvest of malicious laughs. In ruination politics, the reputations or good names of other candidates are reduced to sneers or snickers. The favorite indoor sport of today’s howling public is to urge the political lions in the electoral arena to snap and snarl and bloody one another. No doubt about it: Rationality is long a thing of the political past. And so of our political maturity, our public participation, of the spiritual depth of civic society, as well.

  If this step of humility teaches us anything, it is that humor and laughter are not the same thing. Benedict does not forbid humor; he forbids the bawdry and the brutal. He makes the quality of our laughter a measure of our spiritual adulthood.

  Fools, he says, quoting Scripture, “raise their voices in laughter.” Fools: the dull and the unwise, the imprudent and the silly, the demeaning and the sarcastic. Once we ourselves fall into the habit of deriding others, we join the ranks of the foolish, too. And why would any of us do that? Surely only because we have not owned our own afflictions, our personal impairments, our interior disadvantages, our clear and public impediments. It’s only when we face our own shortcomings and personal limitations that we stop laughing, sneering, or snickering at anyone else’s ever again.

  Then, humility frees us from the burden of insufferable pride. We know now that life is to be taken seriously. This is weighty stuff we are about. The care of the planet and respect for the animals and love for our brothers and sisters for whom we have responsibility are not to be taken lightly. There is no room for foolish, destructive, demeaning laughing anymore. There is no regard for the kind of laughter that is mean and nasty, lewd and lascivious.

  What are the spiritual implications of this step of humility?

  Interestingly enough, the easiest way to discourage a relationship is not to smile at all. We’ve all known the type. They’re straitlaced and serious. They command attention and enjoy control just by doing nothing that looks inviting or fun-loving or emotionally open. What they need, we think as we try to deal with them, is a good laugh. A bit of fun in life. The chance to let down and let go and let be. And that kind of experience, in our own lives, in a world over fifteen centuries away from this call to humility from the sixth century, is proof of why laughter cannot be taken lightly.

  We know now that the way we deal with laughter has a lot to do with the way we treat the rest of the world.

  Maybe no other step of humility is quite as clear about what it means to have an inflated ego as this one. When we put ourselves in a position to deride others, we have abandoned all pretense at spiritual ripening. Self-knowledge withers and self-control goes to dust. We have lost our tether to the earth, to our humanity, to humility in its fullest, richest meaning.

  Humility is not false modesty. Nor is it false humor. Humility owns its reality. Humility is our ability to be comfortable with both the truth of who we are and the truth of who we aren’t. The truly humble do not permit themselves to act like playground bullies who taunt others in order to assert their false sense of superiority.

  Instead, laughter is meant to refresh our view of the world. What we laugh at gives us new insights into ourselves. It helps us to see what engages us, what has us by the soul—the limitations of others, loveless sex, nativism in a pluralistic world, money and power unlimited? Or love and fun and play and care and joy? We have the chance when we laugh to assess the nature of our laughter. We can now determine its place in our spiritual as well as our social life.

  Laughter is meant to heal us, not to divide us from one another. Division is always a sign of the dwarfed soul, the heart that has yet to grow up enough to care for someone besides the self. When what we laugh at divides the world into insiders and outcasts, it is our own souls that are sick, not theirs.

  Holy laughter saves us from self-centeredness. It teaches us to laugh at ourselves, not others. It reminds us of who we really are—down deep and
hidden from sight. It exposes us to ourselves just in time to save us from making useless shrines to ourselves.

  I remember a poor, crippled boy in the neighborhood, disfigured and slow. He ran with a loping limp, groaning and moaning as he went, and I watched the older boys make fun of him, mocking and groaning as they went. Soon after trying for weeks to be accepted by them, he didn’t come out to play anymore. He disappeared from sight and hid from those of us called “normal.” But the truth was, I knew, even at that age, that those who mocked him were really the crippled ones. His disfigurement stayed with me all my life. Without him I might never have found the soft spot of the soul in me. I should have told him that, but then I was only nine years old myself, and greatly in need of the opportunity to feel ashamed at all the ill-gotten laughter he brought us.

  I learned then that thinking seriously about what we laugh at saves us from taking the herd mentality for granted, helps us to watch who we imitate, to be careful who we call friend. We need, as we grow, to be conscious of the kinds of things we laugh about. We need to learn to ask ourselves who won’t find the joke funny. Why? Because we need to decide if we want our humor to be our own or are simply going to borrow our laughs from the gracelessness of people around us.

  It’s an important moment in the spiritual life the first time I stand solemn-faced in the midst of a laughing crowd, too committed to the God of Love to laugh at the unlaughable. After that, I remember to think through the so-called funny things of life one more time, to give them the serious attention they deserve.

  Laughter is a very important dimension of life. Because it masquerades as the harmless and the frivolous, it is easily dismissed. And yet what can possibly be more spiritually important than the way we insert ourselves into the world around us? Was Kristallnacht fun in Germany? Was looting fun after the New Orleans flood? Did any of the rock throwers think it through later? Did any of them change as a result? And if not, what kind of a world did we become because of them? Is leering and sneering at women the real stuff of comedy? And, when we see pictures like those now, what happens to our own view of the world?

  The spirituality of laughter is running underground within us. It tells us what we do with our rage and what we do with our honor. It refuses to allow us to hide ourselves behind hostile remarks. It makes us think again before we say, “Oh, I was just kidding! Don’t take everything so seriously!” We know now what a living lie bad humor can be.

  Finally, the spirituality of laughter calls us to protect the powerless around us as well as to deepen our own souls. Until we discover the difference between wit and sarcasm, between what’s funny and what’s crude or rude or unkind, we have a soul without sensitivity. Healthy humor is what enables us to relate to the rest of the world without threat, without pain. It takes us into the heart of the other and leaves them feeling better than they were when we got there. It gives the gift of holy laughter, which takes away the gloom, the darkness of the day, and makes life alive again.

  The gift of humor makes a hard road smooth and a long road short. It brings the world together; it never sets out to tear us apart. Those who give the world a good laugh leave it in better mental health than they found it. They are the physicians of the soul. They enable us to carry our burdens with more energy, more heart than we can ever do in a world that is cold and dark.

  In this tenth step of humility, Benedict wrote his sixth-century concern for being rational, reasonable, righteous people. What could be closer to the notion that we must not allow our best selves to be defeated by insulting or bullying everybody else? The spiritual point of the tenth step of humility is that humility walks through life softly, kindly, caringly, and with a dignity that refuses to stoop to pornographic laughter. And because of it, we are all better, all kinder, all happier—all freer, all more full of the love of life.

  The demon of mockery exposes my own emotional neediness. For those whose laughter is crude or lewd or unkind, there is no such thing as spirituality.

  For those whose laughter is kind and life-giving, the heart is already open to the universe. For them, laughter is the sound of the presence of angels around them.

  The eleventh step of humility is that “we speak gently and without laughter, seriously and with becoming modesty, briefly and reasonably, but without raising our voices, as it is written: ‘The wise are known by few words.’ ”

  What is the challenge here?

  It didn’t take long before we all figured out that the “war to end all wars” (World War I) didn’t end war at all. Instead, peacetime became a bridge from one war to another, all of them deadly, all of them fruitless. The government whipped up support for them by inciting fear of communism, and the churches concurred.

  In fact, the society found itself slipping into a culture of war—one after another: Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam. Then Afghanistan, Iraq—the Middle East, the debacle no one saw coming. It was a time of eternal conflict. A time of tension and uncertainty like no other. The answer to everything, it seemed, was violence.

  We were in one conflict after another. And this time the violence spilled over into our city streets, into our children, into our schools and inner cities and small towns. Into our DNA.

  In the monastery some years later, I tried to imagine what kind of world the writer of the eleventh step of humility had known. It had been a pretty bucolic place, I supposed. At least until I knew a bit more about the Roman Empire and its fall, the persecution of the faith and its martyrdoms, the collapse of social order and the takeover by the barbarians—the foreigners and immigrants of their time.

  And yet, in the midst of that kind of upheaval, the writer of this Rule called for measured tones and gentle words. More than that, he called Roman men, of all people—the privileged and the powerful—to live gently and kindly, humbly and reasonably. Amazing.

  How realistic, I wondered, was such a proposal either there or in my own country, in my own time?

  Then, one day, I came across a study that turned my head around completely. It said:

  The medieval monarch Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1194–1250 C.E.), was alleged to have carried out a number of experiments on people. These experiments were recorded by Salimbene di Adam, an Italian Franciscan friar, in his Chronicles.

  Frederick II, Salimbene di Adam recorded, carried out a deprivation language experiment. Young infants, he decreed, would be raised without human interaction. That way, he thought, he could determine if there was an innate natural language that would emerge in them once their voices matured. Frederick was seeking to discover, Salimbene said, what language would have been imparted unto Adam and Eve by God.

  Salimbene di Adam wrote that Frederick encouraged “foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he labored in vain, for the children could not live without clapping of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.”

  And so, all the children died. The point made by such a cruel experiment may not have suited Frederick II, but it, and so much of contemporary social psychological research, has much to say to us. First, communication is part of the life force that drives us, shapes us, brings us to fullness of life. But, second, perhaps just as important, the way we communicate will determine the quality of our own lives as well as of the lives of those we touch.

  But I didn’t really need academic studies to prove the truth of these points. I have traveled a great deal in a world where international contact and “citizen diplomacy” have become standard. And I have learned the hard way that language is the key to all of it. The night I was stranded in the mountains of Italy and minutes away from the last bus back to the city was excruciating. I had no way to call a cab, no way to ask for help, no way to find lodging in the dark. Why? Because I ha
d no way to make my needs clear.

  Or the day in Egypt that I could not find my way out of the bazaar and back to our cab because I could not read the Arabic street signs, or storefronts either for that matter, let alone read a phone book to make a call.

  Or the day that the train we were on went on strike and left us on the siding, too late to catch our train to Switzerland and no way to get reservations for the night.

  The examples are endless. I can still feel the fear of it all, even in the attempt to tell the stories. We are a people of mixed tongues trying together to build a better world. And what can substitute for the languages we do not have?

  Never has understanding been more significant than in our own time. The globe is a chattering, blathering polyphony of languages now. A veritable Tower of Babel. Each of us speaking our own language, often at cross-purposes with the language next to us.

  What we say and the way we say it now has the power to destroy the entire world. The very thought of it brought me to a great pause in life. For the first time, I stood in actual awe of a document, sacred in its wisdom, holy in its intent, that can speak to us from the sixth century with such clarity, such simplicity, such overarching wisdom. The eleventh step of humility is as pertinent as this morning’s news.

  I began to see as never before that, at base, life is about language. Our own, first, must be gentle, reasonable, brief, and modest. Humble. We are not the ruling center of the world. Most of all, we must learn to listen. Then, we must learn to speak with all the needs of the world in mind. And wherever we are, in whatever family, church, city, society, country, we must take the first step toward a loving, peaceful world by speaking there as we would want the entire world to talk to one another.

  We must begin to free the world from this perpetual war of words by freeing ourselves from the acrimony our own words can bring.