Laughing in the Face of Leaving

In mid-May, nearly a quarter of us will abruptly become former Providence College undergraduates. Broadly considered, this is a good thing. Seen on the horizon at three and a half months’ distance, however, this development is deeply unpleasant to behold. We are to be swiftly, albeit quite ceremoniously, exiled from our accustomed haunts of the past four years and severed from those with whom we have lived and studied, eaten and slept, pondered and prayed.  To extend the metaphor of the college as alma mater, we are to be from her bosom untimely ripped.

Beyond this preemptive nostalgia, however, lies a much broader anxiety about the future. Some of us have jobs or graduate programs already lined up; many of us do not. Most of us will not be stepping directly into life careers, and virtually none of us can reasonably expect to get from here to a settled state of life without turmoil, strife, and a great deal of uncertainty.

Precisely on account of this uncertainty, these are exciting times for us. By contrast, midlife crises occur just when the major plot points of a person’s saga have been settled, and life’s suspense dissipates considerably. For us, however, there remains a mass of exciting suspense, around the edges of which lap black waves of fear.  While we delight in our time as the elder statesmen of the student body, above each of us hangs a sword of Damocles.

This fear comes in two main varieties: those of us with concrete career plans and aspirations are afraid of that which will impede our progress toward those goals, while those with unsettled ambitions are afraid of everything. As the old proverb goes, for a person who does not know where the port is, no wind is a fair wind.

In many ways, the former fear is a better kind to have; there are, after all, any number of ways to skin the same cat. In another sense, however, the inchoate fear of the still-undecided senior is preferable, for it seems to put one in a better position to accept and embrace the mysterious mandates of God’s providential governance.

Our plans for ourselves often do not correspond to God’s plans for us. Many times, we petition God with prayers for specific intentions. We do this for weeks, or even months, until making that request becomes such a habit that, one day, we realize while praying that our prayer has already been answered. Occasionally God‘s answers to our entreaties are much as we envisioned them; usually they are not. 

In either case, however, we laugh. We laugh at ourselves, whether ruefully or joyfully, for not sooner seeing God’s answers to our prayers for what they are. We laugh at our extraordinarily limited perspective on everything, even our own lives, which, in comparison with God’s omniscience, is properly an object of mirth. We laugh at the majestically unfathomable relationship of love between God and His creation, confirmed and further mystified by the Incarnation of Christ. This laughter, like all laughter, has its genesis in the absurd. 

I do not mean ‘absurd’ in the nihilistic sense in which existentialists speak of the absurdity of human life. Rather, I wish to deploy its etymological meaning of a fundamental incommensurability. The word ‘absurd’ comes to us through the Latin ab + surdus (‘deaf’) from a Muslim mathematician who called irrational numbers ‘unvoiced’ or ‘mute.’ Some quantities, such as the respective lengths of a right triangle’s hypotenuse and sides, simply cannot be reconciled without brute force and a profusion of repeating decimals. This incommensurability is akin to the irreconcilability of the orders of the infinite divine and the contingent mundane, which chasm Christ conquered nonetheless in an unthinkable unification of the two orders.

Laughter, I submit, originates in a recognition of the absurd. In every instance of humor subsists an implicit attempt to reconcile words (see the equivocation upon which puns rely) or concepts (as in jokes playing with group stereotypes), the necessary failure of which makes the situation funny. The remedy for our fear of the future is, of course, the theological virtue of hope—a trust that God has a plan for each of us, and that each plan will be revealed. This hope, however, must be attended by laughter, which stems from the awesome mystery of the providential governance of creatures like us by the utterly transcendent God.

None of us has certain knowledge where he or she will be in five, ten, 20, or 50 years. God does, however, and although He is not immediately forthcoming with the information, each of us can be sure He has it somehow under control. We can be fairly sure, then, that heaven is filled with laughter, the laughter of those who are seeing for sempiternity that during their trials, their hardships, their losses, their bouts with fear and their trips to the brink of despair, God held them safely in His hands all along.