Peter, “It’s just a bit of silliness really.”
JM Barrie, “I should hope so.”

~from the movie, Finding Neverland

There’s something about theology and ministry that makes me serious. Now, that’s not a comment about how seriously I take it, or these are topics of great concern that merit only very serious attitudes.

It’s more that these topics, for whatever reason, seem to cause a shift in my personality. I become very serious. Don’t believe me? Read this blog. It’s very serious, mind-crushingly serious, alienatingly serious. I can’t even remember the last whimsical post I wrote here. I can’t remember, for that matter, the last whimsical anything I wrote. I try to post on what I’m thinking about, but since this is an entirely sporadic blog (liberally sprinkled with “sorry I haven’t written for awhile” sort of posts), I’m not really even sure what the goal of this blog is and it’s certainly not a cross section of what I usually am thinking about.

This has become my serious side. It’s the side of me that doesn’t let itself out in most social situations, and the side of me that, for whatever reason, is both an integral part of who I am and the choices I have made, yet I don’t express in other situations.

Remember the pensieve from Harry Potter? It allowed one to store memories, pulling them out like threads then storing them in a bowl.

This blog, and writing in general of late, has been my pensieve for seriousness. Scroll down, read the earlier posts. Very serious stuff. The writing at least. The pictures are more about beauty.

Truth and beauty, that’s the stuff of life, yeah?

Only for the longest time whenever I’ve had to describe myself or add a tagline I’ve used the phrase “a lover of truth, beauty and occasionally silliness”.

That really does sum up my personality. Only there has been a plain lack of occassionally silliness in my writing. And honestly, I miss it. I’ve been thinking for a while about how to get it back in but, of course, as my main writing task these days is my dissertation and dissertations are, as a rule, especially soul-crushingly serious even within the already serious genre of academic writing, I’ve not a lot of mental space for indulging my whimsy.

I say I don’t have a lot of mental space for whimsy, but isn’t it a matter of making space?

Did I post that part of my dissertation, the part I talked about making space is a significant part of our relationship with God and with others, not only something we do but something that reflects the image of God? I don’t feel like looking now, because that’s tedious, and as there’s few things more serious than tedium, I’m going to dodge looking for the requisite link.

Making space is good. But making space for whimsy and silliness? That’s something the desert monastics would certainly scold me about. Such a serious lot. And the trouble is that I have long taken them very seriously so while I disagree with their scowling about laughter and fun, I realize that there’s was often a depth of spirituality that I, in my best moments, really would love to discover. Maybe my blog has become an unintended reflection of my inner suspicions that theology and the Christian life really are, and should be, quite serious endeavors.

“A hermit saw someone laughing, and said to him, “We have to render an account of our whole life before heaven and earth, and you can laugh?”

That’s from the Desert Fathers. Not all those desert monastic really knew God, but the ones quoted in that book did, and much more than I do.

And yet… to a person, every mature Christian I’ve met or heard speak in person–those whose walks with God are deeper and longer and more thorough than my own–have a sense of humor. That’s always high on a list of relationship ideals, right, that the other person has a sense of humor? That was a big part of my attraction to Amy. She made me laugh.

“And you can laugh?” Yeah, I think so. Precisely because we have to render an account. And there are parts of my rendering that will be, to be sure, pretty ludicrous in the re-telling.

Theology and the Christian life are serious, to be sure, so merit a degree of somber interaction. However, when it comes down to it, both are also pretty ludicrous. We’re trying to come up with words that describe the creator and sustainer and ultimate identity of the universe, who we say is one but also three, God but also man, but not just a man, a man that isn’t like other men but is so much like other men that our very orthodoxy is dependent on testifying that this man is a man as much as other men but not like other men in all sorts of pretty specific ways, like the fact that he didn’t sin and like the fact that even though God incarnated as a man, this man didn’t exhaust all the identity of God even though he was fully God in every way, but since we also have the Father–who was with but not identical with this man, but be careful about using qualifying identical because then you have three gods instead of one; and this third one, or part or mode or person (but not separate person, more of an identity within the threeness of the oneness) is tricky because it’s not really a person, only it is, but more of a wind, or a breath, or a tempest, or a bird? or maybe a force but also a person because our trinity needs three persons and isn’t the beginning of a joke in which a son, a father, and ghost walk into a bar. So, the man died, really died, but didn’t die because he was raised from the dead and is now alive but not alive with us, with the Father, and with us in Spirit–which isn’t a pretty phrase meaning we’re thinking about him but he’s literally with us in Spirit–only to return again at some point which is always just about to happen for the last 1988 years or so.

I could go on and on. But you get the point. There’s an inherent ludicrous quality about theology that sort of inspires a bit of snickering when anyone tries to take it too seriously.

Yet people are very intent about taking it too seriously and if you don’t take it seriously they’ll be the first to remind you how serious to take it. But what do they know?

Really, all that seriousness is about trying to cope with the fact that much of theology, and much of our lives, and much of reality in general is ludicrous. Not because it’s meaningless. But because the meaning is so complex and intricate that our attempts to package it up in brown paper with neat little bows is ludicrous.

And because, I think, God has a sense of humor too, so whimsy is embedded in Creation. Our recognition of it is not dodging the main points of life, it’s indulging in them, recognizing and interacting with the world in a way that doesn’t take it as serious as many people want us to take it.

Finding the silliness, exploring the whimsy, letting go the absoluteness that seriousness seeks to impose, isn’t just a distraction. It is, I increasingly believe, part of our participation with God, part of recognizing the world for what it is–a ludicrous sort of place–seeing the contradictions and complexities as often displaying the ludicrous reality in which we now live.

Laughter is good medicine not because it’s a placebo, but because it helps us see the world rightly once more. Whimsy gives us perspective. And inasmuch as it does, it is, I think, holy.

“And you can laugh?” Yeah, I think so. Because we don’t just render an account our sins. We celebrate our salvation, and that is a feast, a joyous event, a reflection of the fact that this God, the God, our God, takes us seriously but not that seriously. He thinks us ludicrous too, and is willing to rectify our faults because of his love for us, not because we deserve it, because we’ve proven how serious we are about our salvation, but because he wants to. So he does. Ludicrous as it is, God saves us. It’s his whimsy to save the world. God is holy and God saves, becoming one of us so that we can participate with him. Foolish and scandalous as this might be, that’s what he does. And it makes me laugh, because it’s so thoroughly good.

Truth, beauty and occasionally silliness aren’t just a tagline, after all. They’re how I define holiness because they are how I see God’s identity expressed in this world.

They are, as such, also the expressions of love.

Which is, I think, what theology should also be about. Certainly it’s what I want to be about, and I think finding the whimsy and humor again in my writing is a necessary part of my becoming a more developed theologian.

A theologian who is always serious doesn’t really know God.

I could go on and on, writing serious words about whimsy and bogging down in existential introspection about my own identity as a theologian and the seriousness of silliness as part of the theological project. But, that would be ludicrous, so instead, let us end with this, a yodeling pickle.

This post is part of the May Synchroblog. Here’s a list of other participants in this month’s bit of silliness:

• Jeremy Myers at Till He Comes – Lighten Up!
• Maria Kettleson Anderson at My Real Journey - The Art of Passionately Lightening Up
• Melody Harrison at Logic and Imagination – {I Don’t Do Joy}
• Wendy McCaig – Lighten Up: Learning to Let Go From A Man Who Lost It All
• Carol Kuniholm at Words Half Heart – Resurrection Laughter
• R. Lee Bayes at Southern Humanist – Loving Light
• Alan Knox – Be Sarcastic With One Another
• Tammy Carter at Blessing the Beloved – A Tricky Little Journey
• Christine Sine at Godspace – Lighten Up: It Really is the Best Medicine
• Glenn Hager – Margaritas, Metallica, and A Serious Case of the Giggles.
• Liz Dyer at Grace Rules – A Spoonful of Sugar
• K.W. Leslie at More Christ – When Jesus Made A Funny
• Maurice Broaddus – Why So Serious?
• Ellen Haroutunian – A Laughing God

Some (unedited) musings from my dissertation:

Those who are investing their identity within oppressor oriented models — models where competition and domination are considered positive rather than negative — tend to rationalize their behavior in the context of their wider philosophical and social milieus. By participating with the crucified one, however, such rationalizations are discarded, seen for what they are—forms of self-alienation in the guise of self-fulfillment. Participants in forms of non-infinite identity are, ultimately, anonymous — they are without identity because their attempt at identity is contradictory and transient. They lose themselves in the mass of other objects, all flailing to be unique in a morass of historically tired attempts to assert themselves as unique. They define themselves by what they do, how they compare, how they control – but ultimately they remain anonymous as they are not differentiated in their identity through their participation with the fullness of identity, loved and empowered as subjects in God’s particularizing mission.

They are nonhuman inasmuch as they are distant from the only source of substantive human identity—the God in whose image they were created. Oppression is the active negation of such an identity, self-imposed exile from Kingdom, participating as subjects in the crucifying rather than in being crucified. In other words, those who seek to establish identity through means of oppression are given the pronouncement, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” There is no hope where oppressing promises hope, there is only hell.

That is precisely why a liberation of the oppressor is important. The oppressed realize there is no hope. The oppressors often do not. And in their deception they perpetuate sinful structures and behaviors, leading them and other inexorably towards death and dissolution.

Only the way of the cross includes the path to resurrection, and only by participating with the crucified God do we then have a substantive hope for not only salvation from but indeed and more importantly, salvation into. This salvation into includes those ultimate goals for which oppressing tends to be concerned—issues of fulfillment, identity formation, security. Because the cross entails the loss of identity, the resurrection is about more than resuscitation of that old identity into becoming a more successful version of the same. Jesus does not valorize who we were but awakens us to new possibilities in accordance with who we were always meant to be. The resurrection is not futuram but an advent, a novum of new life, a new thing, a new way of living.

The cross opens a person up to be a new person, emptying and forsaking, while the resurrection is the promise of filling, of new life. That is why salvation is described so many times as indicative of this new life, a new way of being in this world, rather than merely debts being paid or acquitting judgments. A person is “born again,” given a new start in who they are, as particular individuals no longer enslaved to the determinative history which preceded, but rather interpreting that history as a path of redemption that leads into, first, death of self, then resurrection of new self.

As this path gathers together people from all backgrounds, the blameworthy and the blaming, it entails another basic human need, that of community, non-competitive, non-authoritarian community where identity is not derived either by establishing identity over and against others, but by sharing in the identity of Christ so that each person becomes substantively able to participate as a free person among others, celebrating diversity in an infinitely complex unity.

Well, we had an eventful Easter weekend. On Good Friday, we got a call from the doctors office telling us that some of Amy’s tests had come back elevated, so we had to go to the hospital for more tests. The doctor on call (our doctor was on vacation) strongly suggested inducing, as Amy was at about 38 weeks and the tests suggests a few possible concerns, some quite major. Both mom and baby were still healthy, so it seemed better to keep it this way by delivering.

That started Friday evening, progressed all throughout Saturday. I got a little rest overnight, Amy hardly any. Amy had an epidural about 8 on Saturday night, we thought we would have a better sleep as it moved along, delivering well into Easter.

Well, we were both woken up at 11:45 by nurses who had noticed the heart beat was lower, a possible sign the baby was on her way. And so she was. Shocking to Amy and to the nurses, and to me who woke up hearing “Call the doctor, the baby is coming very soon.” I woke up pretty quick.

Amy started pushing around 12:30. At 12:43 am on April 8, 2012 – Easter Sunday – we welcomed a very alert and very interactive Vianne Rose Oden into the world.

Both baby and Amy are doing quite well. We finally came home yesterday afternoon. Thanks so much to the wonderful nurses at Arcadia Methodist who helped ease a time of pain and anxiety before the delivery, and then who helped us find our way as we became parents for the first time. Thanks to Dr. Walker who took care of us right at first, worked behind the scenes during the inducement, and who was very kind and skilled at the delivery.

And most of all thanks be to God for a wonderful, beautiful, healthy baby girl.

Some details for those who are interested: She was born 5 pounds 13 ounces, 17 3/4 inches long, and blonde hair (showing her Oden genes, as with both Amy and me only my dad’s side of the family has blonde hair).

Now some pictures:

Oh, and the name comes from the movie Chocolat, we heard it and both liked it right away. It’s pronounced Vi- as in the letter, and Anne as in Anne.

A wee bit from my dissertation writing:

Moltmann writes:

When the crucified Jesus is