First appeared in Thinking Faith. The squares of the city will be full of boys and girls playing there⦠They will be my people and I shall be their God, faithful and just.
The relaxed holiday atmosphere seems to suggest that play is a gift of God, a sign of salvation, and that those playing children are witnesses of eternity. Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem! A non-believer, looking at the average congregation leaving church after Mass on a Sunday morning, might well agree, and even a believer might think there is some truth in this assessment.
Perhaps, at least in some parts of Europe, this attitude has something to do with our Jansenist inheritance. Yet the fact remains that darkness creeps into our lives when we do not make time to rest, to get off the treadmill, and when we take ourselves too seriously. The love that is laughter is a gurgling, rumbling, irrepressible love that wells up from the very depths, is quite uncontrollable, irresistible, seems to split us in two.
An amusing situation, a good joke, a comical story, can ease an oppressive atmosphere, and can introduce a note of unexpected hopefulness even when we feel burdened by all kinds of problems.
Once, many years ago now, travelling on an early train from London to Manchester, I noticed that a youngish man sitting opposite me was engrossed in a book. Unfortunately, I could not see the title, but he chuckled over that book so infectiously that near the end of the journey I simply had to ask him what he was reading. Looking at him, his smiling eyes, his bright, positive expression, I felt it had certainly done that. We are made for laughter β we feel the better for it, more relaxed, more confident, more contented.
