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© Hannah Wells
4 January 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
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PRAYER
As a new year begins,
let us reflect – gently, but with conviction, with courage.
We have so many selves, and we must consider:
Which one lived the most last year? Which part of our selves was given the most permission, the most air time, the most control?
Are we living our lives the way our best self would choose?
Though it is fearsome, let us listen to the nagging voices in our minds that ask us to consider new ways of living, to consider changing habits, to consider changing how we think about ourselves.
Do we know who we are? Do we really have a sense of our place in the whole extended family of humanity? Can we see how much we share with each other and how we are different? Are we comfortable with the story that is unique to us? Can we see how our story is in fact, not unique?
Let us love our selves in the story we find ourselves in. We each have a story, and may we see that our mistakes are as important as our victories, because we can learn from them. May we forgive ourselves and with calm intention may we let our hard lessons become blessings.
May we let the voice of our better self be heard. Where there is regret, where there is fear, and where there is shame, may we acknowledge it and discover ways of integrating these difficult emotions that make us so human. May we see that it is wise to not ignore the darker parts of who we are, but to listen to them, to let them guide us toward change.
May we see that we are never alone, and may we see that the greatest resolution we could make is simply, with ourselves, to be honest.
Amen.
SERMON
You might be expecting to laugh a lot during this sermon – but the pressure to make that happen was too great for me so I’m going to try to make you cry instead. Of course, trying to get you to cry is a lot of pressure too. But that will be the joke. You are expecting to hear something light hearted and funny, but instead I’m going to talk about the sad truth. And that is the main point of this sermon – let’s just get that out of the way. I don’t want anyone to think too hard this morning, including myself. What’s funny in life and what’s sad in life can be very closely related to each other, closer than we realize. Laughing and crying are two sides of the same coin – that coin we spend as the currency of healing.
When I went on the net to research the phrase, Spirituality of Humor, I found myself in an ocean of information – of jokes, of musings, of profound philosophies and theories of the interfaces between spirituality and humor. Even so, there was evidence that this is a field that is just beginning to come into its own. There’s a site called integrativespirituality.org, and the subject link titled “Spirituality of Humor” reads that it is “under construction.” Serious interest and attention to this topic is only beginning. I believe that the spirituality of humor will actually be a key player in our human evolution. Humor will help us to discover the means to world peace because there is such a tremendous need for the world to heal.
But I really don’t want to get too esoteric with this topic – remember we are trying to not think too hard today. It’s too early in the morning, it’s too early in the year. We’re going to keep it simple.
Besides, our hope of future world peace isn’t very interesting. We’re more interested in the here and now. There are many takes on the spirituality of humor that I could present to you today, but I want to focus on how humor is healing.
Although crying and laughing are two sides of the same coin they are not interchangeable. It’s more like they each make the other one possible. We all need to grieve from time to time. But if we repress our grief to an extent that is dangerous for our souls, our laughter becomes in-genuine. It is not so much of a healthy release as it can be an expression of bitterness. If grief doesn’t come out in tears, it finds other ways to come out – through anger, through a nameless discontent. As the Buddhists point out, life is about suffering – suffering caused by losses, by frustrations, by life’s inevitable changes. “The only thing that stays the same is change.” But just as the good periods in life don’t stick around, neither do the bad. We’re familiar with the saying, ‘this too shall pass.’ We also know the saying, ‘some day you’ll be able to look back on this and laugh.’
And it’s here that I want to make a disclaimer, to make something abundantly clear: there are some losses and tragedies in life that we will never be able to laugh about. There’s nothing funny about them and there never will be. These losses are like scars – they will always hurt when we touch them. There are many tragedies and losses in which the only means to healing is lots and lots of crying. In a sermon about humor, this is the most important point: WE HAVE TO CRY. There’s a lot of things none of us get enough of, and one of them is giving ourselves permission to weep. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, adult or child, the tears we shed over losses are specific to the need to heal.
When we cry enough, we can still cry some more. I have often convinced myself that my grieving was over, when it wasn’t. I wanted it to be, but I was fooling myself. Even when you think you’ve done enough, do some more. Even if the loss happened years ago, it’s never too late to take care of the unfinished business of grieving. At some point we come to accept that this kind of grieving will continue to revisit us throughout our lives – and this is okay. There are some things we will never “get over” and we’re not supposed to. Once we accept that the scar is here to stay, it’s okay when it gets touched. This grief is particular to us – it is ours – and we can allow it to shape us in ways that strengthen our character.
It’s so important that we cry when we need to because otherwise the weight of that unexperienced sadness detracts from our ability to experience joy. I can’t share the good news with you all of laughter – unless I assertively drive home the point that you must embrace the bad news of hard truths. No, I don’t want you to think too hard today but I want you to think about feeling hard. There’s a huge difference. It’s hard and necessary work to let our minds surrender to what we are carrying in our hearts.
And this is how crying enough makes laughing possible. It’s not that eventually we can laugh about the loss. It’s that the grief makes healing possible – and being healed allows us to experience the goodness of life again. We can get our sense of humor back. We can laugh again – that genuine, full-throttle, belly-laugh. When we permit ourselves to cry enough, we also permit ourselves to return to the other side of the coin of suffering – that life is a gift and we are supposed to enjoy this gift as much as possible, despite the tragedies, despite the losses.
There are many aspects of life in which humor and healing do go hand in hand. There are many difficult situations we find ourselves in that, under a certain light, we can see the irony or humor in it. It’s a blessing when we can laugh momentarily in a serious situation. It’s of spiritual significance because it’s a saving grace – it’s a break from the solemnity that weighs on us. When we can laugh at ourselves, we surrender to our humanity and our humility because we realize we don’t need to take ourselves so seriously. It is often in situations in which we see that we are not alone. We see that our problems and weaknesses are not unique, but rather a part of the human condition.
Almost all of us have a personal issue, a personal problem that we either allow to continue and worsen, or we decide to take steps towards changing so we can have a better life. If you think you are one of the lucky ones who is issue-free, I would say, are you sure? There’s nothing you need to work on? We all have our vices, or things we do compulsively that get in the way of our health and wholeness. Or perhaps it’s what we’re NOT doing and avoiding that is causing anxiety in our lives. Or maybe we’ve just lost or ignored a little part of us that we love and we miss. Now’s a great time to do some exploring around this, as it is New Year’s Resolution time, which is rather a joke in itself as I believe the statistic is that a whopping 90% of new year’s resolutions are not followed through. So don’t think of it as a resolution, think of it as steps towards having a better life, towards “progress and not perfection,” as they say in 12-step meetings.
Up to this point, I’ve been fairly abstract in this sermon – describing emotions but not being terribly concrete. I want to be more grounded in a subject that is too esoteric, too philosophical. As I was writing I realized I needed to bring myself into this in a real way, to describe my own situation of tears and laughter, to tell you a little bit of my own story. And I realized that it had to be through alcoholism – because I am an alcoholic in recovery.
I’ve been attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for almost two years now, and I can say that I’ve never seen a better example of the ways humor and healing can intersect. You get a group of drunks together who have some years of sobriety under their belts and you will be amazed at the amount of hilarity they can produce with each other. When you first get into recovery, nothing is funny at all. You’re terrified, you’re in despair, you may have lost your job or your family, you’re disoriented, you’re suffering the effects of withdrawal. Mostly you’re just terrified because you don’t know if you can really quit drinking or not. You’re on the cusp of hope and hopelessness.
But if you’re willing, one thing that keeps you coming back to the meetings is seeing that the people who have stuck it out are able to laugh at themselves. At first, you’re kind of jealous and resentful of this – how dare they be happy when I’m so miserable. But then you think, I want what they have. It’s the fellowship and camaraderie that is so integral to the healing process. Part of what makes the laughter possible is discovering that you’re not alone – that there are thousands of people like you, and if you made a joke about your alcoholism – about how bad it used to be – they would get it. You’re one of them! The jokes are funny because you used to be in that awful condition where you didn’t have control in your life, but now you can laugh because the demon no longer has a hold on you. All the ugliness and embarrassment of it doesn’t define you anymore.
At a meeting I went to on New Year’s Eve a woman shared the story of her moment of truth that finally got her into recovery. She had been using for over 30 years, both alcohol and speed, since she was 12 years old. She ended up in jail finally, and said what a blessing that was, because she was forced to sober up. But when she got out, she was faced with the choices of her freedom. Looking back on her life of addiction, she realized she either had her head in the toilet, was in prison, or was facing death. Or, at this point in time, she could choose God and begin her recovery. She paused for a second, then she spewed out the litany of her choices in short order, “it was toilets, prison, death, or God! Toilets, prison, death, or God!” And in the first moment of clarity she ever had in her life, she said, “I chose God.” Nearly everyone in the room could see both the truth and humor in that and we all laughed. Most of us had been there ourselves.
This sense of humor in recovery – any kind of recovery, I believe – is so important because most of the time it is really hard and scary work. Even with the help of fellowship, it can still feel lonely. I know I have found for myself, that I have to go easy on myself, that right now, there’s a lot of shame and anger that I’m just beginning to learn how to work through, because for so many years I covered these things up with drinking. This is serious stuff! So when I find a moment where I can laugh at myself, when I can see the humor in the midst of the struggle of this disease, I welcome it because it’s an indicator that some healing has happened. I’m getting that much closer to accepting myself, alcoholic and all.
Whether we’re laughing at ourselves, or a joke someone sent us on e-mail, or even a dirty limerick, the immediacy of laughter is worth noting because it’s a part of life that we easily take for granted. I know I am living in the present when I am consumed by laughter or when I get the giggles. If you’ve never experienced the uncontainable giggles in church, you’re missing out. Maybe that sounds immature or disrespectful, but we’ve got to let the child out sometimes. We can’t always be proper, we can’t always be serious. I do believe our laughter is a link to the divine because there is such an element of spontaneity and presence to it. It’s childlike. What if we could trust the divine as easily and quickly as we are able to laugh? What if that innocent and childlike faith could be ours again?
We get closer to that when we heal, when we learn how to accept ourselves and the people we love, flaws, follies, and all.
There’s a web site I recommend called spiritslaughing.com. On the page titled “Something Serious About Humor” it says,
“What is spirituality? It is living one’s life in a personal God-orientation. What is humor? It is a slice of life that produces some level of laughter by the way it is uniquely set apart from everything around it. Spirituality equals life. Humor equals a slice of life. Each works best when operating within the same life at the same time. . . Our spirit has been given the capacity to laugh, and it can operate at full capacity only when it is enriched by the presence of humor . . . if we insist on having one without the other, we end up with neither. A spiritually dead person without a sense of humor does not need to check their bags because they are going nowhere, and no one wants to go with them.”
I have another personal testimony about humor and healing. Like so many alcoholics, I come from an alcoholic family. Yet I am the only one on the path to recovery, I am the so-called ‘interrupter’ of the family system. It’s very lonely and frustrating at times, and I’m only beginning to accept one of the cardinal conditions of recovery – that just because I will get better, that doesn’t mean anyone else will.
One thing I realized I lost at the very beginning of recovery was the ability to connect to my brother, who is a couple years older than me. We’re very different and, ever since we were teenagers, the only time we could really connect on an emotional level was when we got drunk together. We could talk about real things then – we could talk about whatever worries we had about our parents, we could talk about our fears and regrets and disappointments in life. We could talk about some of the struggles of growing up, our most embarrassing moments, our mistakes. We could even say that we loved each other.
My guess is that my sobriety now is threatening to him because he knows he’s an alcoholic too, he has admitted as much in those drunken moments of truth. So we stopped connecting at all. But last summer I decided to make an effort – I said, let’s go out one night just the two of us. We did that but it wasn’t the same. He didn’t open up and I didn’t know how to, either. So we went home and were sitting in the car in front of the house we both grew up in. I remember thinking, I have nothing in common with my brother anymore.
But then we started talking about my parents – the one thing we’ll always have in common. We started reminiscing about all the things that were funny about growing up with our mom and dad. Even the things that weren’t funny at the time seemed funny to us then. We laughed about their habits and how Dad would buy some kind of mid-life crisis sports car then sell it because Mom wouldn’t have it. That happened about three times. We realized we could document each phase of our family history by which cars were in the garage. We laughed about how our Dad’s mother used to drive our mother crazy. Then we started joking about the peculiarities of our grandparents and all the silly stories that happened when we traveled with them. We started laughing so hard, we joked that we could make a fortune if we started a brother and sister comedy act and went on tour.
My brother didn’t want us to get out of the car and go inside because we would wake up Mom and she would freak out – this was another regular occurrence for us growing up. We laughed and joked about our childhood for over an hour and finally I went inside, and he drove home to his young family. There was no recognition of how things are different now. We didn’t connect in any serious way, but we connected through our sense of humor. It was something; it was a start to a new brother and sister relationship.
Whenever we hear of abstract themes like tears and laughter, we can only make them real by attaching them to real memories from our own lives. That was the only way I knew how to make this theme real, by connecting it to my own story. But please understand, I don’t want or mean this to be about me. I want you to find the ways that you relate to the notion of healing through tears, through laughter, and how closely related these can be. All our stories are different, but we’re all in this together. It’s kind of like a dance where we take turns taking steps. I took my shoes off this morning, and maybe I’ll get my toes stepped on.
But you dance too. Think, this week, this first full week of the New Year, of something you need to grieve some more, some more healing work you need to do. What about it makes you want to cry and what makes you want to laugh. We’re all trying to learn how to be the best selves we can be – and you don’t need to think too hard about it. Just dance. Just feel.
I’ve always liked the phrase, ‘if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.’ Many of us have a sadness that runs so deep it goes beyond compensation. But if we can accept that it is particular to us, yet not unique, we can find a means to heal, to forgive, to move on to what else life has to offer us. Let a sense of humor and laughter be a part of this.
As Rumi says, your cup of joy is only as full as your cup of sorrow – so take a drink.
Take a drink.
