Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
January 9, 2000

Religions in every culture are inextricably bound with language, and this is particularly true in the Western Monotheist traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the creation story recognized by all three, in Genesis, God speaks the world into existence. He says, "let there be light!" and there is light.

The famous passage from the beginning of the Gospel of John that we read this morning is the high-point of the scriptural theology of the Word. But the English words that are so familiar to us do not capture the full meaning of the passage. Take the opening phrase, "in the Beginning was the Word." The word, which is translated beginning, is archae from which we derive not only the words archaic and archaeology, but also the words archenemy and archangel and architect. It has one meaning as beginning, but it can also mean the principal or the first in authority.

And that is only for starters. The word which is translated "word" in the passage has even more ramifications, so many that a lot of ministers and theologians these days prefer to simply use the Greek word logos. Now logos is a word with many meanings, as attested to by the many words in English derived from it: logic, biology, philology, travelogue. It has the sense of "word," but also and more importantly the sense of "reason" and "plan." Reason, in Platonic philosophy, was an attribute of God; it was about the holiest thing there was. Plato conceived that each human had within him or her a seed of the divine reason, spermatikos logos, that was the most important endowment bestowed on humans by God. The first verses of the Gospel of John are usually considered an attempt to import Platonic philosophy into nascent Christian theology.

So instead of "in the beginning was the word," we might translate the passage, "most importantly, there was reason, and Reason was from God and Reason was God." But if we did that, we would lose the echoes of the beginning of Genesis which the author was undoubtedly trying to evoke.

For my purpose this morning, it does not much matter whether we take logos to mean "reason" or "word" for both are properties of the phenomenon we moderns call "speech," and the fundamental importance of either is that humans have them and animals, by and large, do not. Humans are not the only species that communicates – almost all animals transmit some information from one individual to another – but we are the only species which can and regularly does employ symbols in our communication. A symbol is anything that stands for something else, as the flaming chalice stands for Unitarian Universalism, and as each word we use stands for some unit of communication we call its meaning.

Whether or not we adhere to the neo-Platonism of the Gospel According To John, though, we have to concede that religion is by its very nature a verbal enterprise. Most religions have their sacred texts, some of which are though to have been divinely written or dictated or at least inspired. God's word is what creates, what condemns, what changes history. God's word in a different sense is what is preached and spread as the Good News, the kerygma. The earliest texts we have are hymns of praise to God, and God is usually worshiped in liturgies and rituals involving some form of words. It is true that there is in many religions a mystical tradition that holds that God is ultimately beyond words, that the only true thing one can say about God is nothing at all. This may be true, but it is still an observable fact that most religious ritual activity is conducted in words. The words may only point to the deeper, wordless reality as the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, but we must employ words as pointers in our search.

What prompted these reflections was not some citation to John, but an article I read on the internet about a new theory on the evolution of language. Robert Provine, a psychology professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus, says that language was made possible when primates learned to walk upright on two legs. You see, four-legged animals have a one-to-one ratio between breath and stride. They have to. When the forelegs hit the ground, the impact on the thorax is so great that it would collapse if the lungs were not full. This is why the animals breathing must be coordinated with its stride.

When the animal evolves into a biped, this frees its upper limbs but more importantly, frees its breathing system. The animal can now exercise control over its breath, and develops the anatomy to do this.

Dr. Provine came up with this theory while studying chimpanzee laughter, which sounds like panting. Provine found that the pant-like laugh is a result of an inability to manipulate breathing patterns, limiting chimps to a simple inhalation-exhalation cycle.

"Humans have more flexible respiratory control, making it possible to chop an exhalation into parts, as is evident in the 'ha-ha-ha' pattern of laughter," says Provine.

According to evolutionary anthropologist Terrence Deacon of Boston University, two vocal but not yet verbal behaviors stand out, sobbing and laughing. Both are demonstrated very early in the life of the infant, well before the capability of speech. But sobbing, crying, is an activity shared with many other animals. Laughter, by contrast, appears to be distinctly human.

What this said to me is that there is a fair possibility that laughter preceded formal speech, that the first human word may have been "ha ha." I'm not going to say that this notion has been scientifically proven; indeed, since no one had tape recorders around 100 million years ago, the origins of human speech are always going to be subject to argument and conjecture. Dr. Deacon's own book on the evolution of speech, The Symbolic Species, runs to 700 pages.

My fascination with this idea was not for its scientific truth, but for how it would fit with our notion of the Word as the foundation of what it is to be human and thus of religion, of the religious view of the world. Laughter, not language, may be the most characteristically human sound; perhaps Shakespeare recognized this, for in his litany of factors that make us human, he says "when you tickel us, do we not laugh." We might rewrite the beginning of John as follows:

In the beginning was the chuckle, and the chuckle became a guffaw, and the guffaw progressed to giggle, and the giggle exploded into a hearty belly-laugh and the belly laugh soon had everyone rolling on the ground holding their sides helplessly.

Now laughter, like crying, precedes words. Babies laugh from very early in life. A baby's smile is associated with pleasure in general, but I think that a baby's laugh is based on a fundamental recognition of incongruity. Does this ring true to those of you who are dealing with babies on a regular basis? I love to play "peep-eye" with a kid around six months old, hiding my face and then springing it on them. The kid either recoils in terror or starts squealing with delight.

What is going on, according to some psychologists, is that while the face is hidden, it ceases to exist for the infant. It's only later that the baby gets the notion that anything has an existence apart from their perception of it. So the face that the baby was looking at a second ago suddenly is gone, and then just as suddenly springs back into existence. The absurdity of this state of affairs is what brings forth the laugh.

We laugh, fundamentally, because things don't add up, because they don't make sense. We laugh in the face of discontinuities, of jagged edges, of the lack of fit of our ideas.

Later of course, the child will laugh at physical comedy, at slapstick and funny faces and pratfalls. Later still, as the child acquires language, she comes to realize that this pleasant reaction can be stimulated by words as well. Jacqueline has a four-year-old nephew who has discovered puns, and that is a delight in the deliberate exploiting of ambiguities of the language. At still later stages, the child learns to appreciate situational humor, humor contained in stories, and ironic and satirical humor.

But I submit to you that underlying all these various forms of humor is some recognition of the incongruous, of the gaps in our worlds.

The second key fact about laughter is that it is contagious. From a very early age, children will start giggling when someone else starts giggling.

The social effect of this contagious property of laughter is that laughter is a tool for social bonding. The initial bonding is between the baby and her parents, who are always racking their brains for strategies to get junior to laugh. In later life, it will be between the child and his peers. In still later life, laughter will define and mark the in-group, and thus the out-group as well.

Laughter has an important role in defining social status. Anthropologists study joking relationships in a village or tribe to determine the pecking order. In traditional society, one does not attempt to crack jokes with someone of superior status. The chieftain can joke, and everyone around him will laugh whether they get it or not, but woe betide the servant who attempts to joke with the monarch.

Humor has the power to bond a social unit, but it also can declare certain people outside the unit. Each of us at some point in our lives has been the outsider, the person who, at the mildest, doesn't get the joke, and at the worst, is actually laughed at. Now "getting the joke," is a state of consciousness which can require a great deal of cultural sophistication. You may speak French or Italian or Spanish well enough to order food in a French or Italian or Spanish restaurant, but you can't call yourself fluent until you can get the jokes that the wait staff is telling each other out in the kitchen. Humor, verbal humor, is the hardest thing to break into in another culture.

Then there is the laughter that is intentionally directed at someone. Such laughter can hurt as severely as any other type of abuse; whoever said sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me has never had to comfort a crying teenager who has been ridiculed by her peers. I would bet every one of us, if we searched our memories, could come up with a time when we were painfully laughed at, even if it were decades ago; those kind of experiences stay with you for life.

That's the downside of laughter. The upside is that it is one of the greatest release experiences that we know of, and if there has to be a most fundamental word, if there is one word that brings us to the ultimate ground of being, I think "ha ha" is a pretty good candidate. I like to think of laughter that could cement an intimacy between me and God. I'd like to look God in the eye and say, "I get the joke." And burst out all over with laughter.

Now, the grey eminences who have run our churches for the last 2000 years have largely squeezed laughter out of religion. If you do a word search for "God" and "laugh" in the New Testament and Old Testament, you come up with almost no hits. The closest is when God told Abraham and Sarah that Sarah, then in her eighties, was going to bear a child: both fell on the floor laughing, and when the child was born (God of course got the last laugh), they named him Isaac, which means "laughter."

Most of you know, however, that the particular texts which made it into the Bible were those that passed muster with the church fathers in the Second through the Fourth Centuries, people notoriously short on a sense of humor, from all I could tell. Here is one that didn't make it in, a piece called the Gospel of Philip, thought to be a Second Century writing in Syriac, which was part of the collection of Gnostic texts discovered in the 1940's in the village of Nag Hammadi, in Egypt:

"The Lord said it well: ' Some have entered the kingdom of heaven laughing and they have come out...And as soon as Christ went down into the water he came out laughing at everything of this world not because he considers it a trifle but because he is full of contempt for it. He who wants to enter the kingdom of heaven will attain it. If he despises everything of this world and scorns it as a trifle, he will come out laughing" [The Gospel of Philip 2, 74:]

I think this passage might have been suppressed because the church fathers didn't want to think about people being baptized and coming out laughing.

Or maybe they didn't want to think about Jesus laughing. It may go back to the neo-Platonic logos philosophy I discussed earlier. Jesus was the incarnation of the logos, according to John, and thus represented both order in the world and the source of the God-given ability in each human to perceive that order. Laughter, on the other hand, stems from a recognition of incongruities, of places where the world doesn't fit. This was not the picture the church wanted to paint of Jesus.

Laughter versus logos. I was glad to discover that my impression coincided in a general way with the viewpoint of one of my favorite professors from Harvard, Harvey Cox, who wrote a book in 1969 called The Feast of Fools. His last chapter is called "Christ the Harlequin," in which he points out that Dante called his exploration of heaven and hell the Divine Comedy, but that Christianity before and since had little toleration for humor. Here's part of what he says:

"...laughter enables us to live with the future. Laughter of course can be strained, cruel, artificial or merely habitual. It can mask our true feelings. But where it is real, laughter is the voice of faith. It is the expression not only of our ironic confidence and strange joy, but also of our recognition that there is no 'factual' basis for either. Perhaps that is why Dante reports that when he finally arrived in Paradise after his arduous climb from the Inferno, he heard the choirs of angels singing praises to the Trinity and, he says, 'mi sembiana un riso dell universo' (it seemed like the laughter of the universe).

The laughter of the universe in heaven? Of course. In hell there is no hope and no laughter, according to Dante. In purgatory, there is no laughter, but there is hope. In heaven, hope is no longer necessary and laughter reigns"

Well, our Universalist forebears have taken care of hell and purgatory for us by declaring that they don't exist, so there should be little to keep us from joining in this laughter of the universe. On the Unitarian side, Emerson once listed a set of criteria for the well-lived life, which began, "To laugh often and much." Yes, we descended from some pretty sober and joyless Puritans, but we have tried to atone for it by developing a robust sense of life's absurdities. I can still remember a line from a prayer I heard in 1966 from my college chaplain, William Sloane Coffin: "teach us to take our work seriously and ourselves a little less so." Taking yourself too seriously may not be exactly a deadly sin, but it is a recipe for deadly dullness.

I want to close with a story about how laughter at one point in my life, was my salvation. It involves my first wife and I note parenthetically that it's a sign of grace working in my life that have enough distance from my divorce to be able to tell stories on my first wife. Since she was in high school she has written poetry and fiction. From high school she went to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia, which had a fine writing program, and became friends with the writer we know as Annie Dillard, who among other things edited the Hollins literary magazine. Lee left Hollins after two years, finished college in Boston and married me. The other thing you need to know about her was that she was a first child and had a strong, smoldering, stubborn-headed conflict with her mother in her late teens and twenties.

I think it was shortly before we went to law school that she became enamored of the controlled, elegant but vitriolic poetry of Sylvia Plath and to a lesser extent Anne Sexton, and wrote a Plath-like poem which she called Middlemarch with Mother. It began as follows:

"Huffy is the weather, mother,
Your hag wind nagging at my back..."

And continued through about 20 lines of witch imagery. She showed it to me, and I thought it was therapeutic, but pretty good, and suggested she send it around to see if it could be published. After all, we were in Washington D.C. and there was no chance her real mother would ever hear of it. I then forgot about it.

Fast forward about 15 months. Having completed final exams of our first year in law school, we came to South Carolina to vacation with some law school friends, and one night we all piled into the car and drove in to Charleston to have dinner with Lee's parents at the fancy Fort Sumter Hotel right on the waterfront. We walked in, greeted my in-laws, made the introductions and everyone sat down.

Whereupon my mother-in-law, without a word, laid upon the table a copy of the Hollins Literary Magazine. It had come to Lee's parent's house, because that was the last address that the college had for Lee. And there, right on the back page just above the mailing label, the first thing anyone would see in picking up the little publication, was "Middlemarch with mother."

I broke out into a sweat. I knew the poem well. I knew the insult. Some words, when spoken, can't be withdrawn. I also knew that my wife would have even less clue of what to do than I would. I only knew two courses of action I could take. One involved collecting my wife and the entire crew of friends and hitting the road back to the beach house and never speaking to my in-laws again, ever. The other was to laugh.

I chose the second alternative, I just started chuckling and then the chuckle turned to a guffaw and the guffaw turned to a belly laugh and, you know, it worked. Our friends didn't have a clue what was going on, but my in-laws took me up on the offer and started laughing with me. It was at least five minutes before any of us could compose ourselves. We were wheezing, screaming, the tears were rolling down our cheeks. The Gordion knot had been cut, you could feel the tension letting go: the day was saved.

That, for me, is grace. In the face of a situation in which no words would do, in which the toxic words have already been spilt on the table, to be given the gift of laughter was an act of grace. Amazing grace. I thank the creative force in the universe, and I thank my ancestors who learned to walk upright and thus to control their breathing. In the beginning was the word, and the word was "ha ha."

May we all share in some way in our lives in some piece of the great cosmic joke.