There is a saying passed down from ancient Egypt that I like to recall:
“Don’t forget that the Egyptian mystical priests washed their hearts with laughter at dawn!”
Unfortunately, laughter and the cultivation of humor are increasingly taking a back seat today. This can be attributed to the abundance of negative news from around the world that reaches us nonstop these days. They say, “Bad news sells better!” This seems to be proving true more and more in the fierce competition among media moguls. As a result, we feel less and less like laughing.
Yet every human being is capable of laughter—like crying, it is one of the two distinctive forms of human expression and emerges as early as infancy.
What role, then, do laughter and humor play in spirituality and in the spiritual development toward wholeness?
Throughout the ages, the phenomenon of laughter has fascinated people. According to Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, the process of creation represents a grand, sweeping movement described as “divine merriment.”
Much has also been written about the laughter of the gods. There seems to be an aspect of laughter that, in an eerie way, points toward the realm of the magical-mythical, a realm that is both violent and creative. Violence, pain, and death are frequent companions of laughter in myth and religion; There appears to be a connection between laughter and catastrophe as a result of a situation in which the body must respond, because otherwise the person cannot cope with it. This is also how we attempt to explain the laughing Totonac figures in ancient Mesoamerica in light of the cruel human sacrifice practices that were carried out at that time.
According to Sigmund Freud, this has a deeper meaning in relation to the unconscious. It seems that when we are overwhelmed by deep grief and compassion, a mechanism is set in motion that attempts to release this energy in the form of laughter.
Laughter even has a measurable physiological aspect. The abrupt shift between tension and relaxation stimulates the diaphragm and breathing, which promotes mental and physical health. This expresses the old truism: Laughter is good for you! Just think, for example, of the beneficial work of hospital clowns today or laughter yoga groups.
The philosopher Kant (1724–1804) developed an entire theory on laughter: the “theory of incongruity,” which states that laughter is an emotion that transforms a tense expectation or tense situation into nothing, dissolving it.
In fact, Kant repeatedly wove anecdotes and jokes into his magnum opus, “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781). He also placed great value on humor during his legendary and popular dinner parties. Philosophy was to be avoided as much as possible during these gatherings.
The poet Jean Paul (actually Johann Paul Richter (1763–1825)) said:
“Only those who know about eternity have true humor!”
If one thinks about it longer, it seems that most people—and Christians—today have lost this perspective on eternity, this joyful certainty of the risen Christ.
A negative attitude toward the appropriation of laughter emerged in the medieval tradition on the part of the Church.
There were regulations governing laughter at specific times: Easter laughter, Carnival, and the Corpus Christi processions. Otherwise, church leaders maintained that in this life, there is nothing to laugh about for humans tainted by original sin.
This ecclesiastical stance of necessary fear for the faith is also the theme of Umberto Eco’s novel “The Name of the Rose”. In the final debate with William of Baskerville, the blind, fanatical monk Jorge of Burgos expresses a very bleak, fear-driven theology regarding God and laughter:
“Laughter kills fear. And without fear (of God), there can be no faith. If people lose their fear, the Church would lose its power and people would lose their respect for God.”
How different, then, does the smiling, potbellied figure of the Buddha, the central figure of Chinese and Japanese folk religion, appear to us.
Let us practice laughter once more, this small act of surrender that frees us from the grip of the ego; let us practice the freedom of letting go and recognize, enjoy, and embrace the divine beauty in all things—and its absurdities. A hearty laugh can lead us to truth and insight. Since spirituality is about wholeness, well-being, and the union of opposites, we must strike a balance between control and surrender, discipline and lightness, determination and acceptance. When we succeed in this, we will also be able to wash our hearts with laughter at dawn.
