A Light Touch And A Serious Look

May 15, 1983
Lakeland

Speaking for myself, I believe that I am frequently rescued from gloom and despair by the comic, the absurd, the bizarre. If I could not joke about life, any serious look would be distempered, not tempered. For the past few weeks, I have been clipping items from various sources that appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. So, first a light touch:

[Editor’s note: the following are a series of newspaper and magazine clippings]

From a Wadsworth, Ohio, Episcopal Church newsletter: “The Vestry thanked Ernie Stein for his donation of storm windows and ceiling for the chapel as well for the hours he has spent on the ladies water closet.”
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In one of its reviews of new restaurants, NEW YORK magazine offers this pointed critique of a dining establishment called Elephant & Castle: “The restaurant is a little uncomfortable and a little antiseptic, the kind of place in which one is automatically disinclined to smoke, drink, or entertain libidinal thoughts. It is the perfect place to take a clergyperson to lunch.”
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Letter from a student at John Abbot College in Montreal: “To the Dean: I am hereby returning my identification card since I had deliberately lied about my date of birth. I was helped to discover this by the police. If it would be possible, I would like to get a new I.D. card.” (CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION)
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The defunct Rock Valley Economic Development Commission, which went out of business in 1981, doesn’t know what to do with a $25,000 grant it got from the federal Economic Development Administration. “The money is still sitting in the bank,” says Suzanne Loken, former commission chairwoman. James Schrader, an official with the Chicago EDA, says his office was too understaffed to recover the money.
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The elevator operator, tired of hearing people ask him the time of day, had a clock put in the rear of his elevator. Now everyone asks, “Is that clock right?” (SUNSHINE MAGAZINE)
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According to an ancient Chinese tale, a man who [sic] once heard a rumor that somewhere high in the remote mountains lived a sage who had discovered the secret to immortality. The man sold all of his possessions, severed all ties, and went in quest of the sage. After years of searching, he finally was directed to the home of the famed wise man. But upon arrival he was informed that the sage was dead.
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What’s she doing in the pew? department: The NEW YORK TIMES recently carried a report about Nancy Harvey Steorts, chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. She made a controversial decision. Had she been influenced by the White House? No. “I made the decision in church two weeks before the formal vote. Some people go to church to listen to the minister. I go to think.”
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Want to hear some depressing news? Then you’re the kind of person they’re looking for in Iowa City. The Benevolent and Loyal Order of Pessimists (BLOOP) is holding its annual convention dinner this Friday – appropriately enough, since April 15th is sort of a BLOOPer’s holy day, being both the day income taxes are due and the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. But don’t get the idea they’re a gloomy lot. “In reality, they are generally very happy because 90% of the time they are right and 10% of the time they are pleasantly surprised,” said club spokesman David Leshtz. “They are never disappointed.”
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Ever wonder what a governor does for a living? Children in Maria Cure’s first-grade class were asked how Gov. Jay Rockefeller earns his keep. Some of their answers:

“He tries to tell everyone what to do.”
“The governor of West Virginia judges if people are right or wrong. His name is Ronald Reagan.”
“Our governor in West Virginia is a Mr. Rockingfella. He helps people carry heavy loads.”
“He talks in a microphone about important things.”
“The governor sings good. He tells people that he wants to see them.”
“Our governor talks to people and writes to them until he is tired.”
“The governor judges beauty contests and he stays around very important people.”
“He sends you a lot of bills each month.”
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The city clerk of Berkeley, Calif., is authorized to order all the people with bathtubs there to fill them, then pull the plugs simultaneously. Ask the Sherlock Holmes in your family to figure out why this peculiar law is on the books. Answer: to drown sewer rats.
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From a Frank and Ernest cartoon, 2 bearded, robed men on a mountaintop. One, holding a folder, hears the other say to him, “If those are the ultimate answers to the riddle of the universe, why are they in a loose-leaf binder?”
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Except, perhaps, for that Frank and Ernest cartoon, those light touches are not very profound. The human condition is serious, formidable, threatening. Many of us believe that the threat to human survival is real indeed. How [to] deal with the nuclear threat, the poisoning of the earth, air, waters, the contrasts between the haves and have-nots? How can one contemplate calmly the fratricidal killings in Central America? Starvation, repression, hate, [and] fear touch our planet in many places. Our small lighted tapers do not illuminate very much the threatening dark.

The night of November 8, 1864, President Lincoln was with a few associates waiting for election returns. Charles A. Dana, one of those present, was called by Lincoln to his side. Lincoln took a pamphlet from his pocket and began reading aloud some of the quips and jokes of Petroleum V. Nasby, a folksy humorist.

Secretary of War Stanton was very impatient. Dana tells how Stanton beckoned him into the next room. Writes Dana, “I shall never forget the fire of his indignation ... that when the safety of the Republic was thus at issue, the leader, the man most deeply concerned could turn aside to read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests was to Stanton repugnant, even damnable. He could not understand that this was Mr. Lincoln’s prevailing characteristic – how the safety and sanity of his intelligence were maintained and preserved.

When we take a serious look at life, most of us have to admit that almost all of our energies are expended just in coping with the experiences and events of our own lives. No matter how vast and fearful the world problems, most of our energies are applied to the day by day tasks and worries of living. There are very few who do not carry burdens, sometimes perceived by friends, sometimes not. The lost job of the long-time worker, the limited opportunities for those entering the job market, the illness – when a loved one has an illness from which there is no hope of recovery – how [to] relate to him or her and oneself. When death enters the home, what then? How often the painful global problems of the world are eclipsed totally in the agonies, dilemmas, frustrations of the home the job, the family? [CJW note: felt too tired to think?] How many times have rosy dreams faded in the heat of unexpected disaster? During the terrible days of the Civil War, when a French nobleman asked President Lincoln what was his policy, he replied, “I have none. I pass my life preventing the storm from blowing down the tent, and I drive in the pegs as fast as they are pulled up.” [Have there been] times in your life when you felt like that?

So many times I have heard a troubled person say, “How can I plan with all that’s happening to me?”

In AS YOU LIKE IT, Shakespeare has the exiled Duke say,

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
And this our life, exempt from
public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in
the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good
in everything.”

Amiens responds [I think the line should be read with irony],

“I would not change it.
Happy is your grace
That can translate the stubbornness
of fortune
Into so quiet and sweet a style.”

It is my experience and that of many others, that the sweetness of adversity is only known when one looks back – in retrospect. When adversity is experienced, it is not sweet, but bitter. Whens someone offers the cliché, “all things happen for the good,” the person, troubled, flailing about in the mire of defeat or sadness, is not likely to be comforted. Maybe later, years later, but not in the times of trouble. Who was it [who] said, “Life is an onion. You peel it year by year, and sometimes you cry.”

Then, too, a serious look at our lives eventually deals with the question, “who am I?” We are told that if each of us can deal realistically and wholesomely with this question, we are on the way to emotional maturity. That I believe to be true as long as we allow for foreseen and unforeseen changes in the self-portrait. William W. De Bolt wrote:

AMNESIA

“When I was young as dreams I knew
Exactly what I’d be,
And now I don’t know where to find
Blueprints I made of me.”

There is an identity game where members of the group would write 10 fill-ins to “I am.” Answers [would usually be,] in order: man (woman), father (mother), husband (wife), teacher/manager/lab tech/homemaker, citizen, ... Unitarian Universalist ....

The difficulty comes when we stay fixed with one set of identity priorities. Many persons would put father or mother first or second in priority when the children are young. But there are sad conflicts when a father or mother maintains the same attitude towards sons and daughters of 20 to 30 as when they were seven or eight. I suggest to you that dealing with the perennial question “Who am I” will in the course of time call for placing “father” and “mother” lower in the priorities.

Another example is the placing of husband or wife close to the top of priorities as so many do. Death – divorce – inexorably alters that priority. Failure to deal with that chance shows a distorted picture of self.

Who am I? The focus narrows or widens; the scenes and players change; the lens shutter may be at a slower or faster speed. The self-image modifies, and should.

Unless we do continue a serious look at ourselves, then we suffer because we have neglected our own human limitations; we may substitute the ideal for the reality. Both are needed.

the down-to-earth + the dream
the gritty now + the good expectation

Now, if I have left the impression that dealing seriously with our selves and our immediacies are our only concerns, that should be corrected. Of course I believe that our voices should not be raised, our energies expended on the awe-full problems of war-suffering. Nothing is more obvious, politically, [than] that voices must sound, values articulated, and our efforts added to the weight of the scales.

But for many persons, time for these needed actions for social justice and peace must [be] squeezed out of too little time, and too many day-to-day struggles. All the more reason for more persons to share their limited time and energies.

I believe in both the light touch and the serious look. In another paragraph from [the] article from which I read, Conrad Hyers writes,

“The comic spirit could restrain us from the ever-present temptation to confer upon our finite understandings and endeavors an ultimacy which nothing human enjoys. It attaches, as it were, a footnote to every pious act, creedal statement or proud posturing to remind us of our humanity, our finiteness and fallibility, our foolishness.”

We are sustained by both the light touch and the serious look. These are both ingredients in a religion for humans.