I grew up believing that laughter was helpful – I loved it and I sought it out, not really understanding why it was so important. Whether it was books or television or jokes with friends, I wanted to find ways to bring humor to bear in all my activities. That ritual – that searching for a good belly laugh – created a faithful practice that laughing is a medicine, a healing salve against all kinds of illness.
When I first began to study A Course in Miracles I remember distinctly these lines:
Into eternity, where all is one, there crept a tiny, mad idea, at which the Son of God remembered not to laugh. In his forgetting, did the thought become a serious idea, and possible of both accomplishment and real effects (T-27. VIII.6:2-3).
We live in the belief that we have chosen to separate from God, and that God is angry at us for that split, and that we have to defend ourselves from his mighty wrath. This is the source of all our fear and guilt – the “tiny mad idea” that what we are can be somehow wrenched away from God, that which is All.
When I think of my ontological guilt, the ocean of fear that swims in the primordial ego soup, it seems so big and overwhelming that even to dream of undoing it or healing its effects is impossible. But Jesus assures us that it can be undone and washed away without a second thought. It is, after all, still just an idea at which we need only remember to laugh.
Together, we can laugh them both away, and undestand that time cannot intrude upon eternity. It is a joke to think that time can come to circumvent eternity, which means there is no time (T-27. VIII.6:4-5).
This life that we lead is not so serious. It is okay to laugh – it is actually helpful to laugh – at ourselves for taking somebody’s unkind words seriously, or getting worked up at someone who cuts us off in traffic, for beliving that death can have any effect on what we truly are. We aren’t mocking the world. We are simply remembering that it is not real.
Many years ago, before I began to study and experience Jesus in a different way, I had a saying. When the going gets tough, the tough go to the movies. It was simply a way of saying that I didn’t have to solve every problem, or even try to. It was okay to just relax, be entertained, laugh. On some level, that still sounds like heresy to me. Of course we’re supposed to take our problems seriously. Of course we have to devote our time and energy to solving them.
But more and more I realize that it is okay to just be happy. Laughter works. The funny thing is, when I’m stressed and I allow myself laughter – watching a favorite television show, reading a book, tickling one of my kids, whatever – then my stress is inevitably relieved. Whatever the problem was, it looks different now. It feels different.
And that is what ACIM is about – finding a better way to look at the world, one that helps us divest our identity in it. We slowly begin to allow for the possibility thatt all we have to do to rejoin God is remember to laugh at the idea that we were ever separate from him.
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