Easter Laughter

Oh, the joy of having children in our midst! I love our pop-up pageants for several reasons. One of which is I think it’s thrilling to see the story come to life. Whenever I read our Easter Gospel, I can’t help but feel Mary’s pain and how dizzy-ing the experience must have been for her and the rest of the disciples. They’ve prepared themselves as much as possible, having listened to Jesus tell them his earthly ministry was ending. Now, they’re in the throes of grief, mourning the loss of their beloved teacher—their friend—and suddenly they discover his body is missing from the tomb. 

At first, they don’t understand he’s risen…just that his body is gone. And even after Mary relays her experience to the others, they all come back to see if they can make better sense of what’s happened. I can only imagine that those first hours looked and felt a lot like our pageant—people scrambling to figure out which way to go and which words might be best spoken. It had to have been chaos!

All they could do—all we can do—is live into the mystery of our faith. The only real choice is to believe Jesus’s promise that the violence of the world—that death—will not have the final word. We trust that God’s love will, in the end, wrap us all—the entirety of creation—up into the united Body we are meant to be.

Of course, the other reason I love the pop-up pageant is the performance is always bound to make us laugh—like the year Pete and Anne’s grandson locked the altar gate and refused to let Mary Magdalene pass, so she had to find a different way out to share the news with the disciples! 

And laughing feels good, right? With all that’s going on in our world these days, we need a good laugh. So, anticipating our laughter this morning, I started thinking about how important it is to find time to laugh, and what else comes cloaked in laughter. What I’ve noticed is that laughter—especially in the midst of challenging times, or during a tragedy—is often smuggling in a sense of hope. 

You’ve probably all experienced this when a loved one dies. My Uncle Earl was only 53 when he had a massive heart attack. I remember how my grandmother sat at the kitchen table rocking in her chair, refusing to believe her beloved son was gone. She kept saying things like, “You just wait. He’s gonna’ walk through that door any minute, and then the joke will be on you.” That felt dizzy-ing. None of us knew what to say. We scurried around rearranging the platters of food people had dropped off. 

But, then, someone said something like, “Well, now Earl can hunt and fish all he wants!” Because the joke was always that Uncle Earl had so much huntin’ and fishin’ to do, he barely had time to work. Looking back, I realize that in our laughter, we were saying, “His body might be gone, but he will always be with us.” 

In those moments, I believe we’re also claiming our hope for the future. Acknowledging that this is a very challenging time—one we’d rather not have to experience—but with our laughter, also acknowledging we will get through this. We will make it to the other side.

One way I’ve heard that explained, was in a daily email mediation I received, the other day, from the Society of St. John the Evangelist. Brother Curtis wrote:

Giving our life in love is not without suffering. Passion–Jesus’ passion and our passion–is both about love and suffering. The great mystery of life is how love and suffering coexist, and how they inform each other. Jesus shows us the way.

But, if you’re anything like me, just knowing that “love and suffering coexist” isn’t enough. Lately, I’ve felt weary with every conversation—whether it be with a friend, neighbor, parishioner or someone at the nail salon—we all feel obligated to express our frustration with the craziness of shifting tariffs, unjust deportations, DEI initiatives being halted, the threat of HeadStart programs being cut, and good people losing their jobs.

Because we are Christians committed to helping bring about peace, justice and equity here on earth, we can't look away. But we have to tend to our own spiritual well-being at the same time, being intentional about finding hope. I find hope in the Painted Lady butterflies. 

Have you heard of them? I’ve seen them in the past, and, more recently, came across a hopeful news piece. The reporter wrote: 

At this moment, hundreds of thousands of Painted Lady butterflies are fluttering along one of the most astonishing migrations in the insect world: a [multigenerational] epic trip of roughly 4,500 miles from the sub-Saharan region to the Arctic Circle, at a speed of up to 30 miles per hour.

The report went on to point out that what is even more remarkable, is how the Painted Ladies have continually adapted their diet over the years. Their ability to evolve around different sources of nectar—in other words, the fact that they’re not picky eaters—has made it possible for them to survive, since we humans keep transforming the landscapes along their migration route. I find that extremely hopeful—that God baked resilience and adaptability into creation.

I have to say, the day I drove through a cloud of Painted Ladies, a few years ago, was a little dizzy-ing—thousands of butterflies on all sides of me, as I made my way up Via Cantabria. I didn’t know what they were, or what was happening, until I Googled it later. So, in that moment, all I could do was laugh. How amazing that I was surrounded by butterflies!

So, I challenge you, in the weeks to come, to not only look for ways to stand for justice, but to also intentionally look for hope, and places where your laughter might smuggle in a sense of hope. Another way I’ve heard all of this said is in the form of a poem[1] by Lou Ella Hickman. It goes like this:

in the beginning

there was laughter

loud and long

such were the mornings and evenings

then on the seventh day

in God’s delight of that all is good

God said amen

for eons

God has wept among our violences 

because a God who laughs also cries 

yet like the rich young man 

whose face betrayed his shock 

to our utter bewilderment 

amid the grief the anguish and the violences

God’s Easter laughter explodes

-ALLELUIA & AMEN

[1] risus paschalis: the Easter laugh