There’s really no laughter like funeral laughter. It is somehow utterly unexpected and entirely appropriate every time. In the midst of deep sorrow, a joke escapes, a memory of the deceased – something they said or did, and even if you weren’t there for the moment described by the speaker, you are immediately connected to the one for whom you mourn, to their humanity, to their ridiculousness, to their beauty. And the laughter emerges before you can catch it, draws you out of yourself, brings you into the present in a way that connects you to everyone in the room. The laughter does not short circuit your grief, it mingles with your tears and your grief is transformed.
When joy sits alongside grief, nothing is cancelled out. Everything becomes very human. This, I think, is where hope lives.
Hope acknowledges things are terrible and insists it will not always be like this. In this way, hope is stubborn and obnoxious. Hope says you have every right to be sorrowful right now, to be angry, to be overwhelmed – but you will not let despair become your story. This is why funeral laughter is so powerful. It is not artificial merriment. It is the surprising joy of our shared love and humanity in the midst of grief. It is unforced hope in sorrow.
That first Easter must have been full of sorrow and hope. Sure Jesus is back from the dead, but he still had to die in the first place. And all his friends either saw it or heard about it. Their friend dragged away from them by government soldiers in the dead of night, stripped and beaten, mocked and executed – all under the pretense of legality and law and order. They are shocked and traumatized and afraid and then Jesus just shows back up. Is there joy in it? Of course. Is it a joy untouched by grief? Absolutely not.
The fact of Jesus’ resurrection does not erase the pain of his death. Always remember that the way they know it’s really him is by the mark where the nails have been. His perfect, divine, resurrected body brings hope and knows sorrow – and both are true at the same time.
This past weekend I attended a memorial for one of my dearest friends. I wrote about him a few months ago. His name is Cory and he was my roommate in college. The two of us shared 200 sq. feet for two and a half years, then shared a house for another year, then lived within a mile of each other for another two years after that. That is to say we knew each other. We shaped each other. We became a part of one another. Our relationship was complicated and his death has reminded me that so much of life is unresolved and unresolvable.
The memorial held at the house where he grew up was very beautiful and very painful. I loved being there and also wanted to leave very badly. I sat in a chair in the living room not five feet from his ashes, glancing over at their container every few minutes wishing they would talk. They did not. But his brother Brandon did. Brandon was standing there telling a story about Cory and his voice did a thing that his brother’s voice used to do and I laughed from somewhere so deep within me. Full body laugh. Belly laugh. It was not just memory or sentiment. I could see and hear and feel Cory. That laughter in the tears, that’s divine hope breaking through.
While we were memorializing our beloved, millions of people were marching and demonstrating in cities across the country. Every record of this event I saw showed grieving and laughter in potent coexistence. Homemade signs that embody rage and humor. Sorrow and hope – neither strangers nor enemies. For these millions, disillusionment with our present reality has not undermined a belief in what can be, in what we can be. It is a mighty love that produces such sorrow and hope. A hope that does not acknowledge sorrow is all artifice and denial. But a sorrow without hope? I don’t want to know it and neither do you. We are built for hope.
The next day, we drove through 6 hours of rain to get home to our children. I reached the front door exhausted and held onto them for dear life. It is such a cliché to say my children give me hope. But clichés are clichés for a reason, aren’t they? It is not my kids’ innocence I love – in all honesty I don’t consider them all that innocent. Children experience anger and shame and fear and sorrow and joy and all sorts of what we call “big feelings” just as much as adults do. They’re clueless and naïve and idealistic and wholehearted, but I do not worship or idealize them.
Truth be told, I am scared for my kids sometimes. Not just because of shooting drills and housing markets and unstable authoritarian government regimes although all those things are scary: I’m scared for them because of my friend Cory. The addiction that hounded him, that he fought, that he sought to be free of, that killed him when he didn’t want to die – I don’t want that to happen to any of them. I come from a family with many addicts. I know enough to know I have no power over what will happen to my children, what they will choose, what will choose them. So sometimes I get scared for the future.
But right now it’s Halloween, and my children need their costumes. My youngest child is dressing up as Chicken Jockey from the Minecraft Movie. I am aware that many of you don’t know what that is, and that even if I explained it to you, you would not be any better off as a person. Suffice it to say, the costume is as ridiculous as the name Chicken Jockey suggests, and my extremely talented wife is intent on creating it from scratch. Halloween requires us to dress up and eat candy, to embrace the absurd and ridiculous, to whistle past the graveyard, to laugh at the funeral.
There is a lot of sorrow in our world, in our own country right now – a lot of fear, a lot of grief. And we have the capacity to get lost in it – we have the capacity to be overwhelmed, like we are at the funeral of a friend. Like me staring at that box of Cory’s ashes. When Jesus showed up for his friends in their sorrow he did not erase the pain they felt, but he shook them from their stupor and shifted their focus towards the moment right in front of them. He refocused them on hope. So may we be shaken, by joy and laughter, by signs and costumes and hugs and Halloween and Chicken Jockey and the hope of right now that lives just fine within the sorrow. May hope emerge.
Do not ignore your hope. Do not forget that hope is part of who you are. Being hopeful is not a task or a commandment, it’s what happens when you stop and breathe and remember your humanity: While we were made to experience sorrow, we were not made to be owned by it, to be defined by it. We humans are defined by our hope. It is in hope that eternity becomes present tense, that life is experienced, that joy emerges like a tale told in love, full of sound and fury, signifying everything.
