8th September ‘Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, “After I am waxed old shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?”’ Genesis 18.12

In Umberto Echo’s The Name of the Rose, the Franciscan friar William de Baskerville investigates unexplained deaths in a monastery, which brings him into contact with monks with a very different view on faith. 

Jorge, the grumpiest of the monks states: "John Chrysostom said that Christ never laughed."

“Nothing in his human nature forbade it,” William remarked, “because laughter, as the theologians teach, is proper to man.” 

“The son of man could laugh, but it is not written that he did so,” Jorge said sharply, quoting Petrus Cantor.

“Manduca, iam coctum est,” William murmured. “Eat, for it is well done.”

“What?” asked Jorge, thinking he referred to some dish that was being brought to him. 

“Those are the words that, according to Ambrose, were uttered by Saint Lawrence on the grid-iron, when he invited his executioners to turn him over, as Prudentius also recalls in the Peristephanon,” William said with a saintly air. “Saint Lawrence therefore knew how to laugh and say ridiculous things, even if it was to humiliate his enemies.”

“Which proves that laughter is something very close to death and to the corruption of the body,” Jorge replied with a snarl; ….

Supper over, the monks prepared to go off to the choir for the office of compline. They again lowered their cowls over their faces and formed a line at the door…

William whispered to me, “so another door does exist, but we are not to know about it.”

At 4.30am, three things are impossible to compete with: Sarah gently ‘rumbling’ next to me, an overly expectant ever-hungry cat sat on my chest purring, assuring me of her (cough, cough) constant love. And steroids.  So I concede, and begin to think about the past 24-hours and ‘another door [that] does exist’...

Yesterday, was my last chemo session. The rightly intimidatingly entitled R-Chop was administered for the last time. I am now profoundly aware that that door has closed, but (only) slightly reassured that others exist ‘should further treatment be required’. The metaphorical closing of the R-Chop door has been harder than when I walked through it the first time. Then there was hope, now I wait for the lymphoma jury to exit and return to deliver their verdict whilst they hum the Clashes’, ‘Should I stay or should I go?’. From the dock I scream “go!”

So what of faith now in my mini purgatory?

Three things come to mind prompted by snoring, feline cupboard-love and steroids:

1. As the presumption of innocence is Rumpole’s ‘Golden Thread’, faith is mine.
2. My Headmaster was wrong, it’s not “pathetic” it is quite funny.
3. Spare me well-meaning new age, self-help pseudo-Buddhist mumbo-jumbo.

The Golden Thread 

Horace Rumpole, the fictional barrister created by John Mortimer, always had up his gravy-stained sleeve a closing address aimed at melting the hearts of the stoniest of juries. Through a sentimental appeal to history, starting at Magna Carter he reminded them of their duty to aquit the defendant unless certain they were guilty, “This is the golden thread that runs through British justice!”. Cue: remove hanky from top pocket, dap fake tear, and sit.

During this whole treatment, I have thought much about my golden thread, prompted by my devotional guilt. 

I would love to say that for weeks I have faithfully read passages of scripture and observed the Offices of the Church; I have certainly had the time to read all the bible, and observe all five Offices (and a few more exotic ones as well). However, since hospital, my bible has been a reference book, and time has stopped for my Book of Hours. Yet, bizarrely, my mind mulls on little else when not engaged with the big topics of the day like, “what’s for dinner?”, “has the dog been fed?”, “are families aware that their children’s favourite hide n seek spot in the park opposite our kitchen window is also a public lavatory for joggers and the homeless?” 

Over the past few months my head has become an ecclesiastical echo chamber filled with psalms, sentences of scripture, chunks of liturgy, quotes from the Early Fathers and philosophers. Words and phrases I did not know I knew, resonate, bounce and nourish. When teaching liturgy I always said that part of the function and discipline of the Daily Office meant that it became a part of who we are. 

It was a statement of faith I hoped to be true. Turns out, it is! 

Another statement of faith is that the Holy Paraclete will intercede and give us the words when we need them; He does!

I have discovered that, within me, perhaps not going back to Magna Carter, there is a golden thread of faith. I wish it was more extrovert, outwardly vibrant, conspicuously self-assured and confident, and less ‘questionanny’(sic), but I now know, like S. Peter before me: ‘Where can I go? You have the words of eternal life’.   

“Chapman, stop acting the goat. I don’t think it’s funny, I think it’s pathetic!”

Thus, sayeth my old headmaster on numerous occasions. 

I have been aware, since a very young age, that much in life is bordering on the ludicrous. Life is full of contradictions, paradoxes and the simply daft. 

I have, almost by definition, the most serious job in the world, schooled and honed in piety. Yet it is a vocation that demands I dress (quite rightly!!!!!) in a 16th century costume and tell people God is relevant for them in the 21st century. Faith at its best confronts these inconsistencies. But our Church is full of people who can’t see this and so take themselves too seriously. These are the priests who only tell jokes to “communicate the gospel”. They have no sense of humour themselves and so reduce a fundamental, life-affirming human characteristic, to a preaching tool.

My life and vocation has been littered with moments where laughter has gone too far, but does that make it wrong? The dialogue quoted at the beginning of this blog beautifully encapsulates the Church’s uneasy relationship with laughter and humour. The Bible offers little (no?) support for portraying laughter and humour in a positive way. Laughter invariably accompanies mockery, scoffing at enemies, or a lack of faith etc. Why should Sarah in Genesis 18, by this time no stranger to drawing a pension, be condemned for laughing when told she’s ‘in the family way’, ‘up the duff’, pregnant? Who wouldn’t laugh… Yet scripture is penned by such as these, so Sarah is condemned for not trusting God.

Strange as it may seem I have laughed much during this treatment. 

The daftness of what I see around me still tickles, and I hope the blog bears this out. I have wept much as well; and perhaps that is the point why laughter is so divine. Yes, there is no record of Jesus laughing, but this is the man/God who turned water into wine, told people to cut off limbs if they offended, and saw the prospect of camels fitting through the eye of a needle bonkers. These moments of miraculous and verbal hyperbole are not simply tools to “communicate the Gospel”, but intrinsic to a life that is super-abundant and real.

I have often wondered if I hid behind the laughter—using “humour as a defence… revealing emotional immaturity”—as my psychological pre-ordination selection report said? I can now answer unequivocally, “No”. 

This experience has taught me that I have no defence: something is trying its best to kill me, but medical science and God are trying to save me. It is because I have nowhere to run or hide behind, that I am entitled to be who I am, and so laugh. It transpires that who I am is S. Lawrence, not S. John Chrysostom, so please both laugh and weep with me: to do so is divine.

Spare me well-meaning new age, self-help pseudo-Buddhist mumbo-jumbo

My final faith-thought, whilst standing before another door, concerns the (very) well-meaning new age, self-help pseudo-Buddhist mumbo-jumbo I have been subjected too. Obviously, the books, cards and messages come from a ‘good place’, and I am being a tad of a grumpy old man. However, in the midst of my thoughts on life, mortality and faith, within that selection, the words and sentiments that lie behind them, do rather inflame my ire.

As I say this I am conscious and worried that the goodwill messages will cease, and I will have bitten off my nose to spite my face, but here goes my, “apologia”.

Phrases such as, “let your healing energy come forth”, and “it’s your strength and fight that will pull you through” are, in a nutshell, idolatrous. 

That second element—the idea that the fight will pull me through—has been visually reinforced over the past two weeks in clinic by a man who insists on wearing tee-shirts extolling his anti-cancer chutzpah. He is the owner of a gut which, in answer to the pre-chemo question, “has there been any loss of appetite?”, gives a resounding, “No!”. Thus, in 16:9 ratio his tee-shirts boast the following two legends:

‘F**K Cancer’

🖕‘Cancer’. 

Yet no amount of Churchillian salutes will halt the need for chemo and care.

Over the weeks I have been made powerfully aware of my strengths and weaknesses—or ‘learning opportunities’, as such new age epistlers would say. Thus, I have been made powerfully aware of the need for “other”. I need doctors, nurses, clinicians, family, friends, parishioners and, by extension, God. It is that last ‘need’ which makes a nonsense of the theology/philosophy at the heart of the new age sentiments. 

I am not able to heal myself. The only healing force within me must be that which can turn death into life i.e. God. My strength and fight are not sufficient, I cannot recreate myself; I am the created not the Creator. 

What these new age sentiments do is place the patient in the place of God. That being the case, Nietzsche was right when he said, ‘God is dead’: he understood our propensity to put ourselves in the place of God. In so doing we die, and thus, so too does God. He also understood that this leads to “Nihilism” (death). This sort of Nihilism seems to think that by sticking two fingers up to the man (or cancer) we’ll overcome it. We won’t.      

In one sense cancer is deeply personal, but because it is so personal it affects those around. We need “other” and others. I have been reminded of that and my faith reinforces it. Like S. Augustine of Hippo, I stand before another door, confessing the reality that the peace I seek, I can only find in Thee.