Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Oppression Is Not a Laughing Matter -- Or Is It?

"Future Hope" Column 


By Ted Glick 

“Grant me, O Lord, good digestion, and also something to digest.
Grant me a healthy body, and the necessary good humor to maintain it.
Grant me a simple soul that knows to treasure all that is good
and that doesn’t frighten easily at the sight of evil,
but rather finds the means to put things back in their place.
Give me a soul that knows not boredom, grumblings, sighs and laments,
nor excess of stress, because of that obstructing thing called “I.”
Grant me, O Lord, a sense of good humor.
Allow me the grace to be able to take a joke to discover in life a bit of joy,
and to be able to share it with others.”
Sir Thomas More, “Prayer for Good Humor,” early 1500’s

Last evening my wife and I watched the 2018 movie, “Pope Francis, A Man of His Word.”  It is not a critical look at the Pope, or an objective assessment of his strengths and weaknesses and what he has so far accomplished. It is an unabashed presentation of the Pope as a great man, a moral leader of the world, essentially a saint.

The ending surprised me. After an hour and a half of footage of him speaking and interacting with people all over the world, sharing his thinking and his prayers and his unquestionably genuine concern for “the least of these,” the poor, the final minute finds him talking about two things: the value of a smile and the importance of a sense of humor. Pope Francis tells the camera that just about every day he reads Sir Thomas More’s poem quoted above.

I was struck by the Pope doing this. Is he right that smiling and a sense of humor are so important?

I think there are a lot of people on the political Left who don’t agree with this. I know a whole bunch of them. They are the way I tend to be: very upset with the reality of the world in the grip of a mendacious and maddening, mega-corporation dominated capitalist system that is literally destroying the world’s ecosystems and causing uncountable suffering. How can one make jokes and be concerned about having a sense of humor in such a world?

Click here for the full article.

Source: tedglick.com

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