Laughter as Medicine for Human Resistance Against the Powers and Principalities Afflicting Our World: Reclamation of Sacred Space to Attend to the Suffering and Devastation Across Time
Schylar Ferguson, MDiv
Aristotle’s convictions on the uniqueness of the human species revolve around the human’s uncanny ability to produce laughter [3]. This capacity confronted and confounded Aristotle’s inherited framework from Plato and his analysis of laughter crossed his writings on ethics, rhetoric, and poetics [3]. Following one of the most grievous displays of unethical human conduct, Stringfellow writes “the act of resistance to the power of death incarnate in Nazism was the only means of retaining sanity and conscience [...] resistance became the only human way to live” [1]. Stringfellow and Wink [4] identify and offer a framework of resistance against the spiritual forces of evil at play around us so as to engage the violence and suffering we witness in the darkest parts of our world. If to live humanly is to laugh, how and why would one do that in the face of insurmountable forces of oppression?
Laughter can interrupt the silence formed by trauma and oppression and become an answer for something so evil that it “lies outside of speech because it lies outside of reason” [2]. Laughter and humor is not an acceptable professional disposition of those attending to deep suffering and illness of others. And yet, laughter disarms the powers and principalities of evil that pervade the suffering and illness in this world. The principality of Bureaucratic Medicine has robbed the physician of time – time in which to journey with the patient, time to come alongside the patient and wander through their life to fully see underlying causes of illness, and time to imagine a sustainable way forward to address epistemic injustice to the health of God’s creation. While we cannot create more time in the clinical schedule under bureaucratic restraints, we can employ the honesty of a “theology of laughter” [2] that interrupts systematic oppression within bureaucratic healthcare and resist the violence inflicted on physician’s moral dispositions and ethical engagement with human suffering.
The physician and the minister both attend to the living bodies of Christ by repeating the actions Jesus performed while here on earth - healer and preacher. Jesus proclaims and embodies “an alternative to the ways of the Domination System” [5] and offers us a way to live humanly that both attends to the suffering here on earth while struggling against dominative forces. Christ’s resurrection is a resounding cackle of laughter in the face of the powers of death. Our courage to laugh when the darkness is closing in does not originate from cheap hope, but rather an embodiment of a biblical rhythm of life in which there is a time and a season for everything under heaven - including laughter (Ecclesiastes 3:4). Laughter can create space for the physician and patient to name together the absurdity of insurmountable suffering and claim that evil will not win. While this act of laughter as resistance on the part of the physician may receive admonishment by the administrators of the bureaucracy of medicine, “at least one would have lived humanly while taking these risks” [1].
References:
[1] William Stringfellow. An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene: 1973.
[2] Jacqueline Bussie. The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo. T&T Clark, New York: 2007.
[3] Karl-Josef Kuschel. Laughter: A Theological Essay. Trans. John Bowden. Continuum Publishing Company: 1994.
[4] Walter Wink. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Fortress Press, Philadelphia: 1984.
[5] Charles Campbell. The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching. Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville: 2002.
Laughter can interrupt the silence formed by trauma and oppression and become an answer for something so evil that it “lies outside of speech because it lies outside of reason” [2]. Laughter and humor is not an acceptable professional disposition of those attending to deep suffering and illness of others. And yet, laughter disarms the powers and principalities of evil that pervade the suffering and illness in this world. The principality of Bureaucratic Medicine has robbed the physician of time – time in which to journey with the patient, time to come alongside the patient and wander through their life to fully see underlying causes of illness, and time to imagine a sustainable way forward to address epistemic injustice to the health of God’s creation. While we cannot create more time in the clinical schedule under bureaucratic restraints, we can employ the honesty of a “theology of laughter” [2] that interrupts systematic oppression within bureaucratic healthcare and resist the violence inflicted on physician’s moral dispositions and ethical engagement with human suffering.
The physician and the minister both attend to the living bodies of Christ by repeating the actions Jesus performed while here on earth - healer and preacher. Jesus proclaims and embodies “an alternative to the ways of the Domination System” [5] and offers us a way to live humanly that both attends to the suffering here on earth while struggling against dominative forces. Christ’s resurrection is a resounding cackle of laughter in the face of the powers of death. Our courage to laugh when the darkness is closing in does not originate from cheap hope, but rather an embodiment of a biblical rhythm of life in which there is a time and a season for everything under heaven - including laughter (Ecclesiastes 3:4). Laughter can create space for the physician and patient to name together the absurdity of insurmountable suffering and claim that evil will not win. While this act of laughter as resistance on the part of the physician may receive admonishment by the administrators of the bureaucracy of medicine, “at least one would have lived humanly while taking these risks” [1].
References:
[1] William Stringfellow. An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. Wipf and Stock Publishers, Eugene: 1973.
[2] Jacqueline Bussie. The Laughter of the Oppressed: Ethical and Theological Resistance in Wiesel, Morrison, and Endo. T&T Clark, New York: 2007.
[3] Karl-Josef Kuschel. Laughter: A Theological Essay. Trans. John Bowden. Continuum Publishing Company: 1994.
[4] Walter Wink. Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament. Fortress Press, Philadelphia: 1984.
[5] Charles Campbell. The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching. Westminster John Knox Press: Louisville: 2002.