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When we arrived in Utah, I was forced to think of Edward Abbey and his classic book, Desert Solitaire.  In this, he wrote of his time during the 1950’s as a summer ranger in the parks area, and spoke of the tourist reaction to the arches, the “windows,” the canyons, the massive balanced rocks and the jutting cliffs layered with geological colors: ‘The Midwesterners saw the wonders and spoke of God, but there is no need for God here.  These are magnificent works of nature, but there is no god inherent in any of them’ (my paraphrase).  And so the dry Canyonlands struck me as well.  There was no god there.  The size of it all, the great rocks of thousands of tons, the intricate patterns etched into the land, were all well beyond the hands of any god.
 
Or my god, that is.  For any believer in a monotheistic god, this is a ridiculous claim, as God is the maker of all things, including the universe and the very laws of nature, but it was as I felt: my god was not that powerful; how could he be when he was comfortably ensconced in a modest church in a modest town in southern Wisconsin? 
 
That was how I felt then as I walked among the fit young people of the Southwest who were biking up the steep hills, climbing the impossible pinnacles with ropes and pitons, and rafting the roiling waters of the Colorado and Green and San Juan rivers.  Amongst them I was nothing but a fat old fart huffing and puffing his way over pedestrian trails trying desperately to keep pace in the high altitudes.  Here amidst the grandeur and sparkling energy of youth I was a side-story, a has-been - as was my Midwestern god.  Under the cape of a great cliff or in the depths of a shadowed canyon, both had been humbled as if to nothing. 
 
Fortunately, most of those impressions did not last long.  For one, how could I expect to compete with the youth that I had once been myself?  That was something I had coming to me, and the sting of that truth settled on me like age itself – slowly, and with a bit of humor.  On the other hand, I found that I did not have to apologize for God.  While I might well be a fraud – of course I am – that is my own defect.  We enclose God with our own restrictions and deficiencies, chained as much to our infantile image of Him as we are too many other major concepts.  Read Freud.  It was, then, not the mountains that made God small, but my own image, one that was dashed apart by the staggering heft of the naked geology of the Southwest.  
 
So it was with you, Edward Abbey, and so, I suspect it is for most who deny anything greater than what they themselves can conceive.  We lock the enormity of human potential inside our expectations, just as we lock the unfathomable universe inside a tasteless box of astrophysics and theoretical mathematics – and just as we lock God inside the sermons and tales of our youth, or even in our present-day hum-drum life. 
 
There is more, though, to the Christian god that makes the jump from chapel to mega-universe so difficult to grasp.  This is the One who supposedly sent down a fully divine son to live and eat and defecate and die just like the rest of us.  This man-god came to preach not the cosmological or geological truths of our universe, but rather moral truths that dealt only with the affairs of humans.  Yes, he raised the dead and cured the blind and generally was able to disregard the laws of physics and of life itself, but did he make mountains?  True, it was his “father,” as he himself called God, who parted the seas and hovered above the tribes of Israel for forty years as a truly cosmic god, but who even in the time of Christ still truly believed that? More importantly, his son did not crumble mountains and so on, and for those who look at the Christian religion from the outside, there is nothing more to the life of Jesus than a string of moral teachings that are more congruous with the world of the ancient Middle East than with our world culture today. 
 
Should the Son of Man have come to raise mountains from the dust or call down the stars to swoop dangerously close to our little planet?  Would that not have convinced us of his divinity and of the total sovereignty of God the Father? 
 
In a word, no.  We have about us the creation already, which we have reduced to mental formulae even as we have radically increased its size.  The proof of the creator is already here, so obvious that we of little minds often cannot see it.  It is the moral truths that we cannot see and that must be brought out, so that we might not only live well among ourselves but lose the blinders of our vanity.  It is then that we might see beyond the thin gruel that we have made of our daily lives, and of our perspective of nature.  500 people are said to have seen the risen Christ at the same time, well attested to by many who were put to death for this account, but still we do not believe.
 
The great canyons and mountains bring us to awe when seen anew, just as the ocean does.  This is a start, but do they enlighten us?  Or do we become used to them, as backdrops for our ordinary human-centered lives?  That is what I had done with the concept of the infinite, which was broken and rebuilt by the renewed discovery of the vastness of nature.  But that is not enough, as Edward Abbey’s words exemplify.  God is not seen in his mesas and Canyonlands because our vision of Him has remained, for many, as small as our childhood introduction to him.  The Midwesterners who spoke of God near Ed Abbey were right and he, in his conceit, was wrong.  The grandeur absolutely speaks of God, as do so many things that we have set aside, classified, and taken for granted.  Is rising from the dead less spectacular than forming a mountain?   Is dying for humanity any less humbling than the expanse of the night sky?  Or are they apiece, like youth and old age, combining wisdom and energy and humility to aid in our inner search?  What we might find within is not a mass of cliffs and boulders, but rather the given capacity to appreciate all of their grandeur, for that is the only place that this sentiment lies.  Awe is not on the outside, but the inside, a gift that can also serve as our source of deliverance.  Edward, you made the greatness only as large as your world-bound spirit and are the smaller for it, just as I am the smaller for my comfortable corn-belt god that is humbled by the size of a cliff. 
 
 
 

 
 
While we were attending to the burial of my mother-in-law a few weeks ago, we were welcomed to stay with an old high school friend of my wife and her husband.  It was in a beautiful rural area of Mississippi and we got along like bread and butter, but I was a little bit startled at one of the last things the husband said to me as we were leaving: “Fred, you are an unusual person.”  At least I think that is what he said.  Maybe it was “interesting,” but if that, I still took it to mean unusual.  I replied that he was too, giving back to him his meaning, whatever that might have been, and all was right, but it got me to thinking: what is an unusual person?  How do we define that? 
 
To begin with, I asked my wife if she thought I was unusual.  She said “No, just …… up.”  It was, I presumed, a joke, but I couldn’t stop.  After that non-answer (I hope), I started going through people we knew, asking “Is he unusual?  How about her?” and so on until it dawned on me that there were at least two criteria for “unusual”: the outward presentation and the deeper, more private person.  After doing it this way, it became clear that some people, at least as far as we know, might present themselves as normal but be unusual, then vice-versa, then normal/normal, then unusual/unusual, for a total of four possibilities, just like those genetic boxes we used to draw for eye color and so on.  Continuing with the genetic model, it might be that “normal” is dominant, but then again, that might only account for the “normal on the outside, unusual on the inside” side of the equation. 
 
So we moved on down a list of friends and family members keeping the inner/outer orientation in mind.  Along the way, it did occur to me that this was more of a Rorschach test of ourselves than anything else, but let me leave that for a moment.  Rather, the more we got into it, the more nuanced it got.  Yes, there were those who were, to us, clearly unusual/unusual, and others who were normal/normal, but those increasingly had to be put into context.  For instance, a normal accountant would be a highly unusual football professional; a normal priest an abnormal bartender, a bouncer an abnormal ballet dancer, a cop an abnormal socialist activist, and so on.  From some perspectives, then, the issue became cloudy.  I determined for myself, for instance, that although I might be unusual for a carpenter, I am pretty ordinary for an academic and writer, making me initially unusual, but really normal, even – sigh - bland.  Maybe.
 
Obviously, we have to question everything here, but it also became fairly clear that some people were simply unusual, even whacky, no matter what the profession, just as some people were inherently normal regardless of the profession.  On the one hand, we might consider that certain professions draw unusual people, making the normal undertaker, for instance, pretty unusual in a mixed crowd, but not always.  On the other hand, we might agree that some people were simply unbalanced or marching to a different drummer whether they were part of a New Orleans transvestite dance troupe or a member in good standing of the Pipe Fitters Union - all in all making this kind of categorization very complex and almost endlessly nuanced. 
 
Certainly such considerations are subjective, making this a personality test of the judger as well, something that could only be corrected by a sampling of a much larger, randomized group of judges.  How many would think that the entertainer Prince was an unusual fellow?  How about George W. Bush?  Then we must ask the truly complex question: Why?  Was Prince unusual for his androgynous style, his music, his drug addictions, or his overall personality?  Did we really know his personality?  And what about Bush’s secret artsy side? So on and on it goes.
 
Easter has just passed, and if one keeps up with the daily readings on the Catholic calendar, Monday after Easter is the day that Mary Magdalene walks to the tomb, only to find two angels in it, but no Jesus.  She turns to find someone who she thinks is the gardener and asks him if he might know where the body has been taken.  With a few words, her vision clears and she sees that is it Jesus himself standing in front of her, not a gardener.  As we are told, it was then that she saw Jesus for who he is, just as the three apostles saw Jesus before the Resurrection in his glorified body during his transfiguration on Mount Tabor. 
 
His glorified body: what is it?  It cannot be a mere outward presentation to the group, nor a reflection of privately held quirks.  So then what?
 
It occasionally happens that I am brought to see a part of my personality that I had not known existed.  Some of these configurations have not been pleasant to witness, but some have seemed like a reflection of a personal transfiguration, a vision of the soul that is the very BEST I could be, bestowing on me something like the characteristics of a wise and genuine saint.  This informs me, and I think all of us, that many aspects of the self are somehow hidden, even to the private self.  Now, I understand why the uglier, even nasty, images might be tucked away by the subconscious, but why would we hide our better aspects from any level of self or society?  It is true that we are not doing this consciously, just as many of our prosaic private quirks are not hidden consciously but from psychological habit, but this is different.  The better part should be extoled by the society at large, so why hide them?
 
The reason must be that this glorified self that we probably all share would NOT be extoled by society at large, but rather make us extremely, even dangerously, unusual.  On the surface of it, Jesus was killed for the blasphemy of suggesting that he was the son of God,  but we know well from the New Testament that the Jewish powers-that-be despised him for exposing their hypocrisy, something that many had not realized about themselves before.   Here we witness the fury of men who carefully conceal elements of themselves, only to be exposed as if they had been caught in bed with another man’s wife.  Such humiliation of people in power will never go unpunished. 
 
So it would be with us.  So it is that we hide ourselves from this best-version-of-ourselves with all our might.  Some cannot do it so well, just as some cannot hide their other quirks either, and these are the people we would call unusual.  Those who cannot control the best or the worst of themselves we either constrain in public institutions, relegate to street-life, or publicly mock and effectively destroy.  And while some traits simply must be tamed for any society to continue, our better sides are muffled because they would rock the boats of those  who feel confident, even superior, in their social facades.   
 
We Christians are told all the time that we will eventually suffer for our beliefs if we actually profess them and act upon them.  For most of us, this is not a problem, because we have spent so much of our lives sculpting our inner selves for the outer world (and for ourselves) that to stray from our script is almost an impossibility.  As in most great undertakings, to take that leap from our practiced self to something greater requires faith.  It also requires us to reject the ego-salves that we have been handed by our social/cultural/political milieu.  Tough stuff to do. 
 
Back in Mississippi, I did not want to be called ‘unusual,’ at least without a positive modifier like “unusual in your vast intellect,” because I did not want to be seen as the one chicken in the flock who gets pecked to death.  It is a natural reaction to the world as it is.  We fight other, more acknowledged temptations stemming from our biological natures as well, but the fear of being ‘unusual’ is the most hidden and perhaps the most powerful obstacle we must overcome before we can become truly unusual in the best possible way.  To do so requires the faith that this self is really there, and the courage of the martyrs who stepped from the edge of mere self to realize their cosmic identities.     
                                                                       
 
[Note: I will not be posting another essay until sometime in the first week of May.  FK]
 
 
 
 
 

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I was on the phone with my brother the gun nut, er, expert, discussing deer rifles.  Hunting deer is not my obsession, but my son has suddenly taken an interest in it, so I thought I’d get something more than the single shot 12 gauge, without rifling, that I used last year.  Anyway, the conversation got carried away as usual, and then he told me this unusual thing about a video of two US Army snipers in the first Gulf War.  As I have read, in many cases the guy with the gun is accompanied by a spotter who helps identify an enemy, not just to spot him but to make sure he IS an enemy and not just some pistachio farmer. 
 
So the shooter and the spotter scope a guy over a mile away who suffices as an enemy.  The shooter has a single-shot bolt action .50 caliber sniper gun with a super scope and tripod for absolute support, and he pulls the trigger on him.  “Holy shit!” says the spotter, who is also looking at the ‘kill,’ “that guy just did a flip in the air!”  They both laugh.  “He looked like a swastika floating in space the way his legs and arms were going.  Gimme that gun for the next one.  I gotta do that!” 
 
That’s one way to laugh.
 
Now here’s my favorite joke of all time: What’s round and purple and conquered the world?  Alexander the Grape!   
 
OK, maybe it’s in the delivery, but those are two situations, or mind pictures, that elicit laughter, one of a man being spun in the air by an extremely powerful bullet, and the other of an imaginary warrior who could be nothing but comic, even in his armor.   One, awful, the other, about as ridiculous and harmless as you can get.  Why, then, might both make us laugh? 
 
This goes back to a similar discussion I had on humor many years ago on this blog.  It was about fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s definition of humor as something that put other people in submissive or humiliating circumstances.  My conclusion was that this was so, but not always so: laughter also came from the unexpected, like the identification in the above joke of the world conqueror with a Greek grape. 
 
After a recent reading, it has occurred to me that there is much more to humor.  It concerned a book by an evangelizing Catholic named Mathew Kelly, speaking about his book, I Heard God Laugh.  He claims that God is joy and that laughter is also joy, so the two often come together.  He claims that the people of old who scribed the Bible perhaps forgot to put down the funny parts.  It must have often been hilarious, says Kelly, to be in Jesus’s company, with a man so filled with God’s joy.  This mirth must have burst forth regularly.  I am not sure about that, but Kelly is certainly right about one thing: the scribes and prophets and apostles who wrote the Bible did not have a sense of humor, so much so that it is nearly impossible imagining Jesus telling a joke about Alexander the Grape. 
 
My guess is that he probably didn’t tell such jokes, and that he certainly didn’t laugh at a more common equivalent of the man being shot with the .50 cal., something we can call the “slippery banana” joke which, considering, isn’t that funny for the guy slipping on the banana – or catching a bullet.  But I bet Kelly is right about there being humor while living with Jesus, and not just the subtle stuff 
 
I say this because I believe there is an even better way to lump humor together in all its various forms: that humor comes forth from the recognition of the unknown; that is, it is both a factor of self or human deprecation AND novelty, rolled into one.  This would make laughter a potentially powerful ally of God and the spiritual, for in both cases, it demands from even the haughtiest some degree of humility.
 
There is more to humor than humility, however.  In recognizing that we do not know and cannot ever know the universe, we recognize the infinite creativity of God; and in laughing about it, we rejoice at the infinite possibilities of our world and our separate lives.  Life, then, can never be a grind; and life can offer infinite possibilities, from eternal heaven to only God knows what.  As we rejoice in laughter, we also subtly understand that the weirdness of the universe is, or can be, benign – that its infinite possibilities are directed by a force or forces that just might offer us everything we could ever want, and more.
 
This is not to deny that laughter is often whistling past the graveyard – that is, laughing to shield us from the terror – but in even that, why would laughter help us, except by confirming through our humorous stoicism that there is hope even in terror?  For if there is no hope, would anyone, at least anyone sane, be brave enough to laugh?
 
However, there might just be a problem here: that is, if humor is based on the recognition of our limitations in an infinite universe, how could God laugh with us?  According to Christian ideas, God, including his son, Jesus Christ, is all-knowing.  How then can anything be funny? 
 
I think I know how.  When we do magic tricks for our kids, or tell them of Santa or read them fairytales that they hear with wide eyes, do we not feel their joy and their wonder?  Isn’t this what God would be doing if he laughed?  And wouldn’t this be the best sign that God is more love than fear, enjoying our joy of his infinite creativity along with us?
 
It is a big statement, to say you heard God laugh, but laughter itself is almost as big as God.  It can be mean, but it is only mean in a small way for people who are acting small.  In its depth, it is our humble recognition that life is WAY over our head, but that we are grateful for so great a challenge, for so great a mystery.  In this we voice our belief without words that this universe just might be worthy of our trust.  
 
If God laughs along with us, we know that it is not in the small, mean way, for how could that be possible for something larger than large?  Rather, it is the reaction of a creator who takes joy in his creation, who expresses this joy through us and for us.  It is the reaction of a creator who walks with us, helping us to grow beyond slapstick to the profound wonder that we were made to share.  In its greater form, this is the laughter that is called Awe.