Just In Jest
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday April 6th, 2003
***
Back in the first century BCE, when Julius Caesar reformed the old Roman lunar calendar and instituted a celestial calendar based upon the equinoxes rather than the phases of the moon, one of the secondary adjustments which accompanied that reform was to officially designate New Year's Day as January 1st, rather than having it fall on the first of April, as it had in the days of the Roman republic. Now at the time this change was made, there were a few people -- old Republicans, most likely -- who had a little trouble adjusting to the idea of a "new" New Years Day, and who continued to celebrate the beginning of the New Year the same way they always had, on April 1st.
They became the first April Fools, or April "fish," as they were also sometimes called. You see, there was a custom in those days of exchanging gifts with your friends at the start of the New Year; and some practical joker came up with the idea of giving elaborately-wrapped presents to these old-fashioned April "fish," which, when opened, turned out to be nothing more than an empty box! This was the origin of the "Hilaria," or "All Fools Day," as it is also called in some parts of the world: a custom which has somehow managed to survive down to our present time.
Of course, I’ve always a bit of an April Fool myself. And I’ve never really understood what possessed Julius Caesar to change the start of the New Year in the first place. It should be obvious to anyone, just by looking around, that in terms of weather if nothing else, the beginning of Spring is a far better time to begin a New Year than the middle of Winter, when it is typically so cold and dark and gloomy that the thought of starting anything new just makes one want to snuggle down deeper into their bed and pull the blankets up over their ears.
In fact, I've gotten into the habit of only making provisional New Year's resolutions on January 1st; a practice which gives me the opportunity to try them out for awhile during Lent, so by the time the First of April rolls around, I generally have a pretty good idea about whether or not I'm actually going to be able to stick with them, or instead am simply fooling myself with my well-intentioned commitment to self-improvement.
It's a good system though, and I would encourage everyone here to try it out for themselves-- if you've backslidden a little on the things you promised yourself last January, there's no reason at all why you can't just wipe the slate clean and start and from scratch now in April. In fact, in my own life I've taken this principle even further -- since in my line of work I'm accustomed to beginning a new church program year on the Sunday after Labor Day anyway, and then just so happen to have a very convenient birthday at the end of October, I get four shots a year at turning over a new leaf, and resolving to do all of those wonderful things like losing weight and getting more exercise, budgeting my money, and generally “getting organized.” I may not always succeed at the things I undertake, but at least I get the opportunity to make a little progress, without necessarily feeling like a failure, or a fool.
Change is an inexorable fact of life -- without change, there would be no variety, and without variety, existence itself has very little meaning. The original "April Fools" were people who apparently were so rigid in their patterns of thought and habit that they were unable to accommodate themselves to the idea that the beginning of the New Year had changed, and as a result they became the butt of jokes, a source of hilarity for their more light-hearted neighbors. The ability to accept change, to embrace the novelty of it all and somehow find amusement in the disruption which it often brings to our lives, is a significant emotional and spiritual gift. When you open up the empty box and find there your own laughter, that's not foolishness, it's wisdom -- an insight into the surprising and unpredictable nature of a Universe over which we often lack meaningful
control.
It's the appropriate response to the profound irony of our very being; and when instead we react with anger, with disappointment, with discouragement or frustration (all understandable emotions given the circumstances of our existence) we cut ourselves off from the opportunities of change. The universe laughs at us rather than with us, and we become isolated rather than empowered by the realization of our limitations, because by refusing to acknowledge those limitations for what they are, we give up on the potential of our own adaptability, and thus limit ourselves even more greatly than before. The inability to see the humor of our own foolishness and fallibility is perhaps the greatest limitation we confront as human beings. When we take ourselves too seriously, we eventually discover that the joke's on us; we become heavy-hearted; our gravity weighs us down.
Now I don't mean to suggest by all this that we should therefore simply go through life laughing in the face of tragedy and adversity. We require a balance of the light-hearted and the heavy-hearted in our attempt to attain wholeness: sadness and gladness, sorrow and joy. It's the ironic humor of an Irish wake, as actor Jeff Goldblum quipped in Lawrence Kasdan's wonderful movie, “The Big Chill:” that "they throw a great party for you on the one day they know you can't come."
But just as we sometimes use laughter to shield ourselves from the pain of our existence, so too is the opposite often true: that sometimes it is only out of the depths of our sorrow that we see at last how silly it all can be, and that it is healthy for us to embrace that silliness when we can, to embrace the wry smile and warm chuckle which arise when we realize that even God has a sense of humor, that in many ways we are the punch line of a five billion year long shaggy dog story.
Victims of serious illness such as author Norman Cousins have discovered that a sense of humor has significant therapeutic value, and is often the key element of their successful recovery. The Zen masters of Japan excel at this insight; indeed, there are scholars who have suggested that this is the secret to understanding Zen: that it is all a profoundly elaborate practical joke at the expense of the deep-rooted pretentiousness of religion. And in his 18th century poem "An Essay on Man," Alexander Pope had this to say concerning the human condition:
"Born on this Isthmus of a middle state
A being darkly wise and widely great
[W]e hang between; in doubt to act or rest
In doubt to count [ourselves] a god or beast
In doubt [our] mind or body to prefer
Born but to die and reasoning but to err
Sole judge of truth in endless error hurled
The glory, jest and riddle of the world."
If we ever hope to live securely within the truth behind that riddle, then we must learn to walk the narrow line between our glory and our jest, that middle ground which makes us human, and out of which our meaning grows.
Back in the days when I was managing a bookstore, I saw an interesting article in Time magazine which speculated about the percentage of bestselling books sold in this country which are actually read by the people who buy them. Unitarian minister Robert Fulghum's *All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten* ranked near the top of the list; it was estimated that upwards of 95% of the then one and a quarter million people who bought that book in hardcover have actually read it. And bringing up the rear of the column were Stephen Hawking's *A Brief History of Time* and Salman Rushdie's *The Satanic Verses,* with estimated readerships of only 2% to 3% of the number of copies actually sold.
I had to laugh at myself when I saw those statistics, because out of all of the bestsellers that were identified in the article, guess which two, other than Fulghum's, I had actually read? My bookshelf was empty of all the usual suspects: no Tom Clancy or John Grisham or Danielle Steele or even Stephen King; instead, not only had I read *A Brief History of Time* cover-to-cover (twice), I was also one of the fools who got on a waiting list and then paid full price so that I could actually read the most written-about bestseller of 1989. Salman Rushdie spent a decade of his life living in hiding with a million dollar price on his head after the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him on account of that book -- three quarters of a million copies sold, only fifteen thousand actually read -- an elaborate April Fool’s joke on all concerned-- if the Ayatollah could have only kept his mouth shut, *The Satanic Verses* would have probably never been read at all.
Robert Fulghum, on the other hand, has a great eye for silliness, and in many ways the irony of his predicament is even more profound than that of Rushdie's. For years Fulghum taught High School Art at Seattle's Lakeside Academy and preached Sunday mornings at the Edmonds Unitarian Church while he waited for his second wife to finish medical school. The plan had been that when she was at last established in her practice, he could quit those jobs and have the uninterrupted opportunity to write, something he'd always dreamed of doing; but by the time these events had come to pass, the Kindergarten book was a publishing phenomenon, and Fulghum had been rocketed into yet another career -- that of becoming a full-time celebrity, complete with his own personal publicist and all the responsibilities that entails. His bread and butter is twenty years worth of old newsletter columns produced during his tenure at the Edmonds church; and while I imagine he probably does find time to squeeze in a little fresh writing now and then -- somewhere between his many lectures, his appearances on talk shows and his book-signing obligations -- I sincerely doubt that this was quite what he had in mind when he decided that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up.
There are times when we are all made fools by the circumstances of our lives. Our ability to transcend our limitations in these circumstances is to a large degree dictated by our willingness to embrace that foolishness: to take ourselves lightly, to appreciate the ironies of the unexpected, to laugh at ourselves when we discover that the box indeed is empty, but that we can still find the opportunity to fill it with a gift perhaps much more valuable than the one we originally had expected.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday April 6th, 2003
***
Back in the first century BCE, when Julius Caesar reformed the old Roman lunar calendar and instituted a celestial calendar based upon the equinoxes rather than the phases of the moon, one of the secondary adjustments which accompanied that reform was to officially designate New Year's Day as January 1st, rather than having it fall on the first of April, as it had in the days of the Roman republic. Now at the time this change was made, there were a few people -- old Republicans, most likely -- who had a little trouble adjusting to the idea of a "new" New Years Day, and who continued to celebrate the beginning of the New Year the same way they always had, on April 1st.
They became the first April Fools, or April "fish," as they were also sometimes called. You see, there was a custom in those days of exchanging gifts with your friends at the start of the New Year; and some practical joker came up with the idea of giving elaborately-wrapped presents to these old-fashioned April "fish," which, when opened, turned out to be nothing more than an empty box! This was the origin of the "Hilaria," or "All Fools Day," as it is also called in some parts of the world: a custom which has somehow managed to survive down to our present time.
Of course, I’ve always a bit of an April Fool myself. And I’ve never really understood what possessed Julius Caesar to change the start of the New Year in the first place. It should be obvious to anyone, just by looking around, that in terms of weather if nothing else, the beginning of Spring is a far better time to begin a New Year than the middle of Winter, when it is typically so cold and dark and gloomy that the thought of starting anything new just makes one want to snuggle down deeper into their bed and pull the blankets up over their ears.
In fact, I've gotten into the habit of only making provisional New Year's resolutions on January 1st; a practice which gives me the opportunity to try them out for awhile during Lent, so by the time the First of April rolls around, I generally have a pretty good idea about whether or not I'm actually going to be able to stick with them, or instead am simply fooling myself with my well-intentioned commitment to self-improvement.
It's a good system though, and I would encourage everyone here to try it out for themselves-- if you've backslidden a little on the things you promised yourself last January, there's no reason at all why you can't just wipe the slate clean and start and from scratch now in April. In fact, in my own life I've taken this principle even further -- since in my line of work I'm accustomed to beginning a new church program year on the Sunday after Labor Day anyway, and then just so happen to have a very convenient birthday at the end of October, I get four shots a year at turning over a new leaf, and resolving to do all of those wonderful things like losing weight and getting more exercise, budgeting my money, and generally “getting organized.” I may not always succeed at the things I undertake, but at least I get the opportunity to make a little progress, without necessarily feeling like a failure, or a fool.
Change is an inexorable fact of life -- without change, there would be no variety, and without variety, existence itself has very little meaning. The original "April Fools" were people who apparently were so rigid in their patterns of thought and habit that they were unable to accommodate themselves to the idea that the beginning of the New Year had changed, and as a result they became the butt of jokes, a source of hilarity for their more light-hearted neighbors. The ability to accept change, to embrace the novelty of it all and somehow find amusement in the disruption which it often brings to our lives, is a significant emotional and spiritual gift. When you open up the empty box and find there your own laughter, that's not foolishness, it's wisdom -- an insight into the surprising and unpredictable nature of a Universe over which we often lack meaningful
control.
It's the appropriate response to the profound irony of our very being; and when instead we react with anger, with disappointment, with discouragement or frustration (all understandable emotions given the circumstances of our existence) we cut ourselves off from the opportunities of change. The universe laughs at us rather than with us, and we become isolated rather than empowered by the realization of our limitations, because by refusing to acknowledge those limitations for what they are, we give up on the potential of our own adaptability, and thus limit ourselves even more greatly than before. The inability to see the humor of our own foolishness and fallibility is perhaps the greatest limitation we confront as human beings. When we take ourselves too seriously, we eventually discover that the joke's on us; we become heavy-hearted; our gravity weighs us down.
Now I don't mean to suggest by all this that we should therefore simply go through life laughing in the face of tragedy and adversity. We require a balance of the light-hearted and the heavy-hearted in our attempt to attain wholeness: sadness and gladness, sorrow and joy. It's the ironic humor of an Irish wake, as actor Jeff Goldblum quipped in Lawrence Kasdan's wonderful movie, “The Big Chill:” that "they throw a great party for you on the one day they know you can't come."
But just as we sometimes use laughter to shield ourselves from the pain of our existence, so too is the opposite often true: that sometimes it is only out of the depths of our sorrow that we see at last how silly it all can be, and that it is healthy for us to embrace that silliness when we can, to embrace the wry smile and warm chuckle which arise when we realize that even God has a sense of humor, that in many ways we are the punch line of a five billion year long shaggy dog story.
Victims of serious illness such as author Norman Cousins have discovered that a sense of humor has significant therapeutic value, and is often the key element of their successful recovery. The Zen masters of Japan excel at this insight; indeed, there are scholars who have suggested that this is the secret to understanding Zen: that it is all a profoundly elaborate practical joke at the expense of the deep-rooted pretentiousness of religion. And in his 18th century poem "An Essay on Man," Alexander Pope had this to say concerning the human condition:
"Born on this Isthmus of a middle state
A being darkly wise and widely great
[W]e hang between; in doubt to act or rest
In doubt to count [ourselves] a god or beast
In doubt [our] mind or body to prefer
Born but to die and reasoning but to err
Sole judge of truth in endless error hurled
The glory, jest and riddle of the world."
If we ever hope to live securely within the truth behind that riddle, then we must learn to walk the narrow line between our glory and our jest, that middle ground which makes us human, and out of which our meaning grows.
Back in the days when I was managing a bookstore, I saw an interesting article in Time magazine which speculated about the percentage of bestselling books sold in this country which are actually read by the people who buy them. Unitarian minister Robert Fulghum's *All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten* ranked near the top of the list; it was estimated that upwards of 95% of the then one and a quarter million people who bought that book in hardcover have actually read it. And bringing up the rear of the column were Stephen Hawking's *A Brief History of Time* and Salman Rushdie's *The Satanic Verses,* with estimated readerships of only 2% to 3% of the number of copies actually sold.
I had to laugh at myself when I saw those statistics, because out of all of the bestsellers that were identified in the article, guess which two, other than Fulghum's, I had actually read? My bookshelf was empty of all the usual suspects: no Tom Clancy or John Grisham or Danielle Steele or even Stephen King; instead, not only had I read *A Brief History of Time* cover-to-cover (twice), I was also one of the fools who got on a waiting list and then paid full price so that I could actually read the most written-about bestseller of 1989. Salman Rushdie spent a decade of his life living in hiding with a million dollar price on his head after the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him on account of that book -- three quarters of a million copies sold, only fifteen thousand actually read -- an elaborate April Fool’s joke on all concerned-- if the Ayatollah could have only kept his mouth shut, *The Satanic Verses* would have probably never been read at all.
Robert Fulghum, on the other hand, has a great eye for silliness, and in many ways the irony of his predicament is even more profound than that of Rushdie's. For years Fulghum taught High School Art at Seattle's Lakeside Academy and preached Sunday mornings at the Edmonds Unitarian Church while he waited for his second wife to finish medical school. The plan had been that when she was at last established in her practice, he could quit those jobs and have the uninterrupted opportunity to write, something he'd always dreamed of doing; but by the time these events had come to pass, the Kindergarten book was a publishing phenomenon, and Fulghum had been rocketed into yet another career -- that of becoming a full-time celebrity, complete with his own personal publicist and all the responsibilities that entails. His bread and butter is twenty years worth of old newsletter columns produced during his tenure at the Edmonds church; and while I imagine he probably does find time to squeeze in a little fresh writing now and then -- somewhere between his many lectures, his appearances on talk shows and his book-signing obligations -- I sincerely doubt that this was quite what he had in mind when he decided that he wanted to be a writer when he grew up.
There are times when we are all made fools by the circumstances of our lives. Our ability to transcend our limitations in these circumstances is to a large degree dictated by our willingness to embrace that foolishness: to take ourselves lightly, to appreciate the ironies of the unexpected, to laugh at ourselves when we discover that the box indeed is empty, but that we can still find the opportunity to fill it with a gift perhaps much more valuable than the one we originally had expected.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 5:23 PM
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