The Double Laughter of Faith: Mirth in Christianity and Literature

November 8th and 15th “…faith is a double laughter; that faith laughs at itself and says, ‘I can’t,’ and it laughs with joy and says, ‘He can.’ Faith is the laughter at man’s impossibility, and then the laughter of surprise of what has been made possible with God.”

- Jono Lineburgh Marc Chagall, “Sarah and the Angels” Defining Mirth: (Oxford English Dictionary)

1) Pleasurable feeling; enjoyment, gratification; joy, happiness. Ofen used of religious joy and heavenly bliss.

2) Delights, joys.

3) A thing affording pleasure or amusement; a diversion or entertainment

4) Rejoicing, esp. as outwardly expressed or manifested; merrymaking; jollity, gaiety. to make mirth (also mirths): to celebrate, rejoice.

5) Gaiety or lightness of mood or mind, esp. as manifested in laughter; merriment, hilarity. In early use also: a jest

6) To gladden, delight; to amuse, entertain; (also) to comfort, distract from sorrows What Time Is It? Locating Ourselves “Our response to the wrongness of the world (and of ourselves) can often be an unhealthy escapism, and we can turn to the holidays as anesthesia from pain as much as anything else. We need collective space, as a society, to grieve––to look long and hard at what is cracked and fractured in our world and in our lives. Only then can celebration become deep, rich and resonant, not as a saccharine act of delusion but as a defiant act of hope.”

Tish Harrison Warren, “Want to Get Into the Christmas Spirit? Face the Darkness”, NYT, Nov.30, 2019 Why Mirth?

Arcabas, “Anges Chantant” “God has Gardens to give away! He has cities to spare! He has history he hasn’t even used! The last of all the mercies is that God is lighter than we are, that in the heart of the Passion lies the divine mirth, and that even in the cities of our exile he still calls to Adam only to catch the Glory, to offer the world, and return the service that shapes the City of God.”

Robert Farrar Capon, The Romance of the Word: One Man’s Love Affair with Theology Duccio, “The Crucifixion”, c. 1315-1330 “At its Greek root, the word acedia means the absence of care. The person afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so. When life becomes too challenging and engagement with others too demanding, acedia offers a kind of spiritual morphine: you know the pain is there, yet you can’t rouse yourself to give a damn. That it hurts to care is borne out in the etymology, for care derives from an Indo-European word meaning to “cry out,” as in lament…

…I think it likely that much of the restless boredom, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plagues us today is the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress.”

Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life The Bible and Mirth (Two Verses)

1) Nehemiah 8:12

“And all the people went their way to eat and drink and to send portions to make great mirth, because they had understood the words that were declared to them.” Marc Chagall, “Solitude"

Psalm 119:92

“If your Torah had not been my play-thing, I should have perished in my affliction.” “…play-activity that Pharoah must crush. To suffocate the lambent flame of imagination and language, ‘let heavier work be laid upon the men.’ The shabbat idea offers an escape from necessity, from the realm of the pragmatic: it is a rest time that offers breathing space, language space. In the playful act of reading, reality is redescribed, re- invented… Torah is for reading, study, narration, and interpretation: but, most vitally, it is for play.”

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus The Bible and Mirth (Two Verses)

2) Ecclesiastes 7:4

“The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” “There is a kind of resolute frivolity that invariably has a hidden link to fear, if not to despair. There is a difference between being cheerful–– that enjoyment is the gift of God––and having to be cheerful because we are afraid of looking squarely at ourselves and the world and naming what is there, both bad and good. The mourning on which the Gospel of Matthew pronounces a blessing is one essential way of connecting to reality. It is only after we have already deeply mourned our disappointments, our losses, and our sins that we are ready to make a new beginning on a secure foundation.”

Ellen F. Davis, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs Edith Wharton (short biography)

• b. in New York City on January 24th, 1864 • Spent part of her childhood in Europe (Germany, France, Italy)

• Her first, privately published collection of poetry, Verses, was published at 16.

• “Came out” into society at age 17. • Married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton in 1885; divorced in 1913.

• Wharton moves to France following divorce, where she resides permanently until her death in August, 1937.

• Became a war-time journalist/writer on the front lines, and established several humanitarian organizations.

• Received, in 1916, the French Legion of Honour for her work in the war.

• Published over 40 books in her lifetime, including The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Wharton Residence, “The Mount” Lily Bart (Two Main points)

1) She is beautiful.

2) She was raised in wealth but has since lost said wealth and is trying to gain it back through marriage. “with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: ‘But you’ll get it all back––you’ll get it all back, with your face…’ Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily’s beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance…. She watched it jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility such a charge involved….” (p.29, 30, 35)

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth Lily Bart • “THE GREAT CURRENT OF • “VACUOUS ROUTINE” PLEASURE” • “LIKE A LONG WHITE ROAD • “RACE” WITHOUT DIP OR TURNING” • “CARRIED”/“SWEPT”/ • “WEARINESS” • “HEEDLESS CURRENT” • “BOREDOM” • “INTERMINABLE” “But there was something more miserable still [than the contemplation of material poverty]––it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which possessed her now––the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. …

In whatever form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood––whatever the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made up of inherited passions and loyalties––it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving….

[but] all the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance…” (310-311)

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth Ecclesiastes, from the Saint-John’s Bible, Donald Jackson • What false narratives am I living by? • Whose voice am I obeying? • Where do I conceal cruelty and/or fear with false cheer, pleasure, entertainment, mirth?

• What is my relationship to time? • Do I love the things I think I love?