via humiliatio

The more I love Christ, the harder I find it to laugh at him. The last two thousand years could be seen as a series of humiliations of Christ, who was already scheduled for humiliation while on the earth. As though one round of humiliation were not enough, Christ seems to have been doomed to perpetual humiliation in the face of human things.

But I laughed at him nonetheless, and continue to laugh at him, because laughter can set new boundaries by way of exploding old ones. Christ has been quite a boundary for the human heart, and laughing in his face or at his ghost has been supremely liberating for human beings. Even when his word starts to cut to the quick and transform everything around us, we still laugh, and the laughter still soothes us and sets us apart. To be set apart even from the true and the holy can be a comfort and a triumph. I have felt this myself, and still laugh and roll in laughter while at the same time I am being utterly trasfigured within.

Perhaps this is the way it should be. That is, if Christ is to accompany us along the long road of our disaster, if he is not to leave the whole spectacle once and for all and close the book for good, it might be necessary, even desirable, for us all to engage in and continue enjoying this laughter at his expense. Indeed, it might be one of the most decisive revelations of his powerless power, his impotent omnipotence, this constant humiliation. The necessity of this via humiliatio is seen in the way we continue laughing even when the joke is on us, even when our jokes are no longer good or relevant, even when we have thoroughly forgotten, abandoned, what we are laughing at.

I worry that my growing love for Christ means that I should stop laughing, and rather praise and worship and thank in all solemnity. But perhaps Christ is not and has never been one of those tragic or moral heroes, who forbids us to laugh at anything or at least one certain thing. Perhaps he too was aware of the eternal comedy of existence, the rerum concordia discors, in the great spiral in which one can be lost at the same time as he is found.