Friends of the Family

Put on a happy face: Our God is not a sad God

Who is God? Children get their first idea of God from their parents.

Give a kindergarten child an assignment to draw the face of God. What you might get is a large round circle, eyes, maybe a nose and ears, and a smile. Almost certainly a smile, perched atop a cloud perhaps.

Ask an adult to draw the face of God. What would you get? A tour through the history of art in the West. Decorating our cathedrals and museums are portraits of God by the masters, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Albrecht Durer. No smiles here.

I vividly recall walking with my parents into the church of the Immaculate Conception at age 13 during my first trip to Washington, D.C. There, looming above the sanctuary is the awe-inspiring, commanding mosaic of Christ as judge staring imperiously out over the congregation. Stern, uncompromising, and all powerful. Christ as Zeus.

Before the crucifix became the prominent symbol of Christianity, the image of Christ was rendered either as the Good Shepherd or Christ in judgment.

Good Shepherd or judge, smile or scepter? The theological question could be put this way: Does God have a sense of humor? Is humor a characteristic of the divine? Like compassion or patience, could humor be considered a virtue?

I remember when Catholic grade school and high school classrooms were packed with children. Now a great many of my classmates, although still spiritual, are adults who are no longer members of the church. Why? Because it's impossible to love Zeus. When you fear someone, you want to escape as soon as you can.

A prominent monk, an author widely known for his penetrating writings on the spiritual life, was asked what he planned to do for Lent. Would he fast, live on bread and water, restrict his sleep to only three hours a night, or perhaps wear a hair shirt? He thought a while and said, "Be cheerful."

Easier said than done. For many of us, "cheerfulness" does not come naturally. It is a state of mind, an attitude that needs to be developed. Is there a cheerful theologian, to whom we can turn for help? I found our hero of humor while reading the book, "Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church," by Philip Yancey.

His name is G.K. Chesterton (1874 -1936), who, in his career as editor of a weekly newspaper of ideas, wrote some 4,000 essays, five novels and 200 short stories. Yancey describes him as talking about "the Christian faith with as much wit, good humor, and sheer intellectual force as anyone in recent times."

The key words are "wit" and "good humor." Chesterton would have cringed at the narrowminded, dreary earnestness of know-it-alls who appoint themselves as sole messengers of God's truth. He won people's hearts and minds with his resilient good humor, not with the fundamentalist tools of force and fear. He believed that "joy ... is the gigantic secret of the Christian." And of anyone rooted in the life of the Spirit.

I believe Chesterton knew two secrets of a cheerful life:

1. You are more than you appear to be.

And Chesterton appeared .... well, huge. He weighed between 300 and 400 pounds. During World War I, an angry woman confronted him: "Why aren't you at the front?" He replied, "My dear madam, if you will step round this way a little, you will see that I am." His joy came from the knowledge that he was not his obesity, his age, his profession, his bank account, his nationality, or his status. He felt on fire with the life of the eternal light that is deep within all of us, independent of our material selves.

2. Don't take your external self too seriously.

Yancey writes that "the London Times asked a number of writers for essays on the topic 'What's Wrong with the World?' Chesterton replied: Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely yours, G.K. Chesterton." He enjoyed engaging in public debates with agnostics and skeptics of the day. One of his opponents wrote " To hear Chesterton's howl of joy ... to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults ... was a sight and sound for the gods.... I carried away from that room a respect and admiration for ... this philosophical Peter Pan...."

The ability to laugh at myself comes from the inner conviction that I am greater than the sum of my external parts. My worldly fame and fortune can come and go with the wind. But God loves the eternal spark in me and always will. As we grow in faith, our joy increases.

In the movie Becket, the newly consecrated archbishop of Canterbury shocks everyone by taking the Gospel seriously and giving away the riches of the church treasury to the poor. He's clearly enjoying the process. He tells his fellow bishop: "I'm starting to believe he's not a sad God after all."

(Pankratz is a marriage and family therapist in Catholic Charities Milwaukee regional office.)