Laughing Up A Storm
Sitting down to write on a budding idea can be perilous at times. For me this becomes a sure invitation to the phone to start ringing with no one else to answer it. In fact, I was just going to say a few things about storms when it rang — an impish sort of ring. “Hello. This is. ...” followed by the despairing words, “Life doesn’t seem to make sense anymore.”
Off into the mystic blue went my idea. Instead, as I tried to hear my friend out, I got to thinking about “making sense” and wondering if life ever really makes complete sense. That is, does life ever consciously get so synoptically whole that every fragment falls into place? Maybe it does for a theologian who sees the universe as Christocentric (as I do, though not as abstractly as a theologian). Maybe for a poet. Or, a mystic.
Though I believe God makes rational sense, I also believe God is full of such majesty and humor as to make our tidy way of wanting everything to fit together seem superficial. We might even be missing the glory. I am reminded of H.A. Williams’ description of heaven as a place to which angels come in white robes provided by the heavenly Moss Bros., “because they certainly won't fit and we shall all look like dustmen got up as dukes. And the fun of that will make the party go with a bang.”*
I suspect “sense” comes in bits and pieces, amid the weeds cropping up through the concrete driveway, the smooth running automotive engine bewitched by the failed computer, the sputtering and spats of marital tensions and for-the-time-being resolutions, and the way God rocks us back on our pretensions so that we might enjoy God's laughter.
Come to think of it, I really have written about storms — the unpredictable winds of life — and also how we might even laugh up a storm.
*Williams, H.A. (1976). Tensions. Springfield, IL: Templegate, p. 119.