a Jew a Muslim and a Catholic walk into a bar...

I cracked a joke in church yesterday. I was making some point about joy/complaint and thought of an age old joke about a guy who goes to a silent retreat centre, vows to keep silence all that time and is allowed to speak only 2 words every month to the abbot. After month one he exits, looking disconsolate and remarks to the abbot, 'bed hard' and promptly disappears back into his cell. The following month he exits again, now disconsolate and irritated and remarks, 'food cold' before disappearing again. At the end of the following month he comes out, beyond disgruntled and remarks, 'I quit.' The abbot retorts, 'I'm not surprised, you've done nothing but complain since you got here.' Well, the congregation laughed, not as loudly as say, when I lost my way in the Lord's Prayer like I did last week when we had overseas visitors with us. No. Rather, they laughed like people who had heard this joke before, that is politely, with that half smile that encourages the idea of moving along.

Now at the door after the service one of our members told me a story about a monk (local) who told that story in his monastery. It was seen to be in such poor taste that they made him lie prostrate on the dining room floor for days on end while the other monks walked all over him. That struck me as a little harsh and comes across as an awkward thing to demand; after all, if I was walking over somebody I'd be forced to ask a whole host of questions - where do I stand on this monk? Do I gently apologise after each step? Do I run quickly and hard or slowly and lightly (kind of like entering a cold swimming pool)? Which of those two things is less painful? Do I know have to clean my shoes every morning and before breakfast? And if I personally appreciated the joke, is it hypocritical of me to stomp all over the messenger? - and all that because I wanted an extra slice of toast. It just doesn't come across right.


I think what really got me was the fact that this joke did not crack the top 10 bad taste jokes I have told. Just this week a good friend told me about a joke he told that played, in true innuendo style, on the word 'ass' ending with the line, 'nun announces her ass is wild and free.' The joke was in such blindingly poor taste I sat there shaking my head in disbelief. He told me his congregation hosed themselves. Now I am no Puritan, but I would never have let fly with that joke in my pulpit. Then again my friend does belong to a particularly liberal church. It got me to thinking, if he had cracked that joke in that poor monk's monastery, he might well have been drawn and quartered, or at very least made to lie on the dining room floor, this time face up.    

What hope looks like

I mention all this because I think this is one off the real dangers of the church or religions in general. We are prone to a nauseating level of self-importance and at times, a complete absence of humour. Every now and then this breaks through. I was sitting in a coffee shop once and looked up at the TV. Pope Benedict was speaking though the sound was down; this afforded me the opportunity of not considering what he was saying but how he was looking. He just looked like a little old man in a purple hat. He might well, in that moment, have been railing against some evil in the world, dodging an apology for clergy abuse or fighting global poverty. He may even have been re-hashing some ancient, shaky argument about why woman shouldn't be standing up in church and offering opinions, who knows, but because there was silence it struck me in that moment that we really are all in this thing called life together. Some of us wear funny purple hats because we're special, some of us wear hats sideways because we're cool, some of us wear no hats because we have gel and an expensive stylist, and others of us (the Irish ones, like me) wear hats for less obvious reasons, like keeping the sun off ourselves. As I sat there looking at the mute Pope I thought maybe that is what we should all do: mute the planet for a day and just look at each other, and maybe then some honesty might sneak in and, who knows, a little humour. We mess things up sometimes with too many harsh words and unforgiving opinions.

The best fraternal I've ever been to brought humour and human foible front and centre. Sometimes fraternals are tiresome affairs where us ministers come together to preen and pose and boast about the size of our churches. They can be scarily competitive. By God's great mercy, this particular fraternal went down differently as somebody started to share about all the things they were getting wrong in their ministry. This started an avalanche of like-minded stories from the rest of us where our utter failure to carry out our duties effectively left us looking like the sorriest bunch of religious practitioners south of the equator; and this is the thing, we laughed till we cried. It was a holy, gracious moment.

So I want to posit a theory. It is not a new theory, but an old one that warrants a recall, and it goes like this: spiritual maturity does not take you to an overly serious place, it takes you to a joyous place; a place of warmth, humour and mutual lightness of being. One of our great ministers George Irvine once remarked, don't take yourself too seriously, take Jesus seriously, but don't take yourself too seriously. I love that.