This Is Rome, Truly

If it were not for laughter, we would all be undone by madness. It is like standing at the gates of a holy city and seeing the abomination of desolation set up within it and not being able to do anything about it. And the people in that city go about their business; some are uncaring because they lack awareness of the divine, some are inured to the maleficient by the constant darkness, some are happy because they have found a spiritual home.

For in such a city, the standards and flags are not of the heavens and the legions of the Divine, but of the world and the world's pain; the light of daily life is not the imminence of the Presence, but the effusion of the shiny. The conduits are leaden; the wine is sour; the grasshopper drags its legs to an empty well and finds no balm in Gilead.

Our dreams have become traps. We think of One Integrated Formula Resort, probably with One Formula Integrated Programmes. We cruise to nowhere, delighted by the journey which never ends and the shiny nuggets on the table. It is always night. Always.

Making Fun

I've realised that I am really not a corporate animal in a particular sense.

Some corporate entities require that you work extremely well in ways which are comprehensible to the body corporate - it is a lot like asking that each component of a clock be aware of the other components and that the clock as a whole understands each part. The escapement must comprehend the hands, the hands must comprehend the casing, and so on. This is odd because these parts are non-sentient to begin with.

Some corporate entities require less understanding because a comprehensive code of governance persists - the military has a rigid but flexible framework of this kind; units need not understand each other so well as long as they understand the principles and the code. Some orchestras are like that too.

Some corporate entites are really corporate; i.e., they behave like bodies, in which the brain need not understand the other organs as long as the other organs deliver timely and useful product to the best of their function. The brain is of course the only organ that can understand the workings of the others, but it need not intrude (and often finds it better not to intervene consciously). I don't mind being part of this kind of corporate entity.

But in such a body, whether as part of a clock, an orchestra, a choir, or a flesh-and-blood construct, there are often odd pieces. They are non-essential but allow the body a greater range of function. They are analogous to a glockenspiel in an orchestra or a differential gear which allows a timepiece to keep track mechanically of the phases of the moon, or like a licorice jelly bean in a fruit assortment.

I think I am like this. I am a perfectly dispensable part of my organisation. It is true that I have many uses, but I tend to force the other parts to accommodate me in a way that some parts do not like. And I am subject to my own sense of what constitutes proper obedience to proper authority. It leads me sometimes to throw spanners at random into the situations where the machinery seems to have locked up already; it leads me at other times to say things which provoke or edify with discomfort.

But amidst all this, there is the idea that God made us all with a sense of humour. It is not within man's grasp to defeat or define that sense; it is a divine gift of great power. God gave us the ability and the right to laugh, although He Himself might call us to account for it. I am a laugher. I cannot help but realise that man's strivings are sometimes case studies for the God-given triumph of the foolish over the wise, the weak over the strong.

And I am so very foolish; it is an apprehension that is before me at all times - I am a fool before God, I am a fool beside God. I am weak, and I know that this gives me strength. I confess my failings, my faults, all the time. It keeps me honest. It shows me that I can be better. And best of all, I have the ideal target for laughter - myself. He who cannot laugh at himself takes himself too seriously.

In closing, here is a quote which I never forget. Dorothy Dunnett is the author of many beautiful and perplexing novels (my favourite of which is probably King Hereafter). In her novel Caprice & Rondo, she records the following as part of a conversation between a hierophant and a swashbuckler.

"God is my Master," the Patriarch [of Constantinople] said. "It makes for simplicity. I commend it. For that is your trouble, isn't it?"

This perhaps is the root of the problem. Simplicity is oft confused with folly, or more confusingly, with complexity. I am a simple man, of whom the Patriarch might conceivably have approved. Or perhaps not. Sigh.

Lux Ab Nihilo

I was just reading Mike Carey's fantastic adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, when it came to me what an apt juxtaposition it is, that levitas and lux should be so similar in English.

For this is the reason that laughter is invincible. In the face of crime, poverty, tyranny, and bad judgement, we must in the end come back to the beginning of things. For God made light of the anarchy of nothingness, and that light of creation is the spark of the Eternal City and the benediction of the Divine.

Humour is a signature of the power of God. It is the wry mockery of human pretense (yes, even of what you are reading right now) that is also found in the last verse of the Book of Jonah, where He laughs sympathetically at Jonah's confusion by throwing in a message on animal rights. It is found when Sarah laughs and He replies.

As it was in the beginning, so it will be at the end. And the unbearable lightness of being will be replaced by the unutterable light of Being.