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	In the Beginning Was the Word, And the Word Was, "Ha, Ha"!

	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.

Amen.