SACRED IRREVERENCE

                                      

I always knew there was something funny about religion.

Well, OK, at least odd. I didn’t begin to see it as comical until I actually came to trust the way objects become sacraments, and luck becomes grace. At what point did it dawn on me that what looks like a tragedy (a story that starts happy and ends sad) is actually a comedy (starts sad and ends happy)?  As an article of faith I accepted it the first time I received holy communion, but it didn’t really sink in until the day my daughter Caitlin was born. The process did not “end” there, of course, but I have never lost that deep sense of having been irrevocably and undeservedly blessed.

Let the militant atheists stomp and rage all they want! So what if there is no theistic super-being “out there” shagging prayers like infield flies? I know, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the blessing is the most real and most true of all my experiences. The fact that the Bless-er is a mysteriously fertile No-Thing does not bother me.

But I do sympathize with people who wonder why we talk into thin air as if it were listening, are appalled when we pass out little circles of tasteless bread and say it is the “body” of a man who died 2000 years ago, and think (as my own grandfather did) that clergy are hustlers and social parasites who prey on the credulity of ignorant believers.

I sympathize, but keep right on praying, receiving holy communion, and making my living as a priest. I find those activities to be comical, yes, but also sacred, and true.  According to my father’s Shorter Oxford Dictionary (which weighs 20 lbs , part of the definition of “sacred” includes this: “secured by religious sentiment and reverence against violation or encroachment…protected by some sanction.”  By those criteria, Jesus of Nazareth fails to qualify as a “sacred” figure.” Religious sentiment and reverence” did not secure him against official violence, and the crucifixion was and is a profoundly irreverent act. Hence, Christianity has its origin in an irreverence that reveals what is most sacred of all: vulnerable, non-violent love.

So it’s only comical once you believe it. It’s only funny to those who “get it.” The tragic anti-hero has the last laugh, the arrogant emperors are revealed as buffoons, the purveyors of sacred violence are forgiven, and welcomed in.

In Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose the dour residents in a medieval monastery debate with ferocious intensity the question: “Did Christ ever laugh?” The issue is understood to have vast implications for all of theology and, therefore, the structure of medieval society. Compounding the debate is the discovery that some monks have been decorating manuscripts with intricate cartoons of imaginary creatures, deliberate distortions of nature that seems to undermine the solidity of creation, the reliability of God, and the authority of the church. In this scenario, humor is the ultimate form of subversion.

Hence, “Sacred Irreverence.” Theologian John D. Caputo writes, in The Weakness of God, “If I were coerced by the police of orthodoxy into coughing up an argument for the existence of God… I would point to all the disturbances in being and ask: what is the anarchic arche at the heart of all this disorder? And instead of asking whether some intelligent being must not have designed [the world], I will ask whether something amorous must have loved it.” (p. 14)

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Some pilgrims were surprised to learn that Abba Jonathan had given up attending church. “Why do you not attend the Divine Offices?” they inquired.

“Badly, those monks sing,” Abba Jonathan replied. “Except John the Dwarf,” he added, “rather well he chants, and also yodels, or so been told I have.”

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