Laughter

I've been a bit blue recently, but today I was walking along and just broke down laughing. It's something that's started happening in roughly the past year that I really can't explain, but if it's a defensive mechanism of some sort, it's certainly an enjoyable and apparently highly functional one. I think I'm laughing at myself, really. And the universe, which is essentially comic rather than tragic (if dark comedy sometimes). I have a tendency to take things so seriously and then I look at a tree that, say, looks like an ugly person and I think, "Oh, of course: everything's gonna be okay! Duh."

And it is, as long as I've got God. Which is just it, I think; it's always when I've been to confession recently enough and am in a state of grace. You know, sometimes I speak of sin as involving denying meaning in the universe or making it absurd, but really...I think that's actually sort of what grace does. By limiting our hopes to this world, sin casts a horrible gravity on everything in the here and now, it all matters so much because time is running out and we have to put our last end in something finite even though nothing is really totally satisfying. That's what Hell is really about, I guess.

But with grace, suddenly, you have all the time in eternity, hope of infinite satisfaction for the price of, at most, very finite suffering, and no moment is truly wasted. And nothing can be terribly grave or important compared to God or heaven. Suddenly all our worldly concerns and desires and fears just seem petty and, yes, almost meaningless compared to the meaning of the whole in which the justified man finds his actual Good. And then I really understand the meaning of "What profiteth it a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?"

So then I can come home and dance alone and do karaoke to embarrassing music in an empty house and not worry about all these little things. And if someday there's some disaster and I get killed in some grizzly manner, well, there's nothing I haven't been able to handle yet. What I really usually fear is that I would not be able to willingly submit to such things, that I'd lack the fortitude. But it's on days like this that I realize, looking back on life and deep into the core of my character, that I could voluntarily undergo any torture nonchalantly if I had to. And if that's the case, it's really all these other naysaying and doubting voices which are absurd. Life and suffering are funny that way.