HUMOUR

HUMOUR
is a disguised form of spiritual discipline: an art form dedicated to the never-ending multi-contextual and multivalent nature of reality. A sense of humour tells us that whatever context we might have arranged for ourselves, there is always another context that makes our particular context absurd. Absurdity is the subversion of my present too-narrow belief and my too-narrow sense of my self: my appreciation of a suddenly revealed absurdity tells me, even in the midst of laughter, that I am willing to learn. Humour is my saviour. Shared humour equally appreciated, helps to save us both, shared humour tells us we are on the edge of discovering or seeing something new again, together.

…….

Humour at its best is the passing on of happiness, the natural overflow of felt joy, the ability to lift another’s spirits: one person laughing contagiously, or when we are lonely or alone, a sudden jolly arrival of companionable travellers, sweeping us up and on in the joy of communal bandinage.

Humour can be both a personal and a communal gift: a lifting of the spirits that allows us to look down on our previous commitment to a necessary glumness and see just how much of that shadowed, narrow melancholy was of our own making, how much we refused to get over ourselves, how much we refused to be humiliated in instructive ways; to see or hear things new and surprising about the world and about ourselves - how much we refused to come out and meet the merciful, subversive, humiliating richness of our multi-contextual world that refuses and always has refused, our every, sober, puritanical no-nonsense attempt to pin it down.

David Whyte

This week, I decided to feature David Whyte’s short essay on humour. (Out of six paragraphs, I am highlighting three above: the first and the last two.) It is packed with insights and reflections that are worth pondering in this season. Somehow, we are taught to embrace seriousness (what Whyte calls “narrow melancholy or puritanical” as a virtue in most spiritual traditions. Serious learning can happen through play, humour, or happiness.

I concur with Whyte that humour reveals one’s penchant for learning. Humour is a merciful, humiliating teacher that exposes one’s shallow, narrow, and absurdities of perceived reality. It is merciful because it hits us when we are least guarded, hopelessly trying to defend our myopia and parochialism. If contemplation is “any way one has of penetrating illusions and touching reality,” according to Parker Palmer, then humour cracks open one’s illusions and uncovers new and surprising reality, which always has been.

And to share humour in communities and/or with family and friends is one of life’s richest treasures. Since learning is a lifelong process, we should all make generous room for humour. “The passing on of happiness, the natural overflow of felt joy,” as fellow pilgrims nourish and uplift our human souls like no other.

Humour is endowed with a gift from above to open up all the portals of learning, exposing and addressing all our excuses and refusals to see and know. I can honestly say that I cannot do this serious work alone, but only with communities that are willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn.