Reading Mother Teresa--To suffer and to laugh

“Surely God does not reject one who is blameless 

or strengthen the hands of evildoers. 

He will yet fill your mouth with laughter 

and your lips with shouts of joy.” Job 8:20–21

“Sister Gabriela is here. She works beautifully for Jesus – the most important is that she knows how to suffer and at the same time how to laugh. That is the most important – to suffer and to laugh.” (24)

Up beside my office desk stands this picture of the Reverend Bernard J. Haan, founder and first president of the college where I taught for the last 37 years. It’s almost 70 years old, from Life magazine, in fact; he’s outfitted in his finest swallow-tail coat, holding forth in front of the pipe organ, no pulpit in sight.

It has to be posed because I can’t imagine that a professional photographer – some worldly guy from Life – would have been allowed to wander up the aisle during Sunday worship to shoot, willy-nilly, umpteen photographs of the Dominie opening the Word of the Lord. I may be wrong.

I didn’t know the Reverend Haan when he was a young preacher, but I’ve heard enough about him to be able to guess that he hammered that pulpit, beat out his strongest points on the massive Bible that sat up there back then. He was young, robust, opinionated, and charismatic. Within a few years, he had accumulated a following so wide that he’d had sufficient deep-pocketed disciples to start a college, part of that following growing from a reputation he gained for keeping a theater out of Sioux Center – the reason the national  press was in town back then.

A couple of decades later, by the mid-60s, he was a warm and genial old codger, capable of measured self-reflection, a fiery preacher who could – and did, famously – laugh at himself.
By the time he retired, he could actually “do” himself in legendary self-parody. He knew what the crowd expected of him, that he could play himself – with style and grace. And success when his audience understood that he was shucking and jiving, being himself by doing himself.

Late in life, he told me that when he looked back, he wished it hadn’t taken him so long to learn that the way to the human heart is via a smile, a laugh, some sweet joy. That’s what he told me. He regretted not learning that lesson earlier. I keep that old picture of him around because it helps me remember what he says it took so long for him to learn.

I don’t know that the Rev. B. J. Haan suffered – or how, but I’m confident all of us do. And I don’t know about Mother Teresa’s friend Gabriela either – how she might have suffered there on the streets of Calcutta. I can’t compare her suffering with his; but then, really, it’s impossible ever to match my suffering up against yours or anyone else’s. Suffering is suffering.

But I think Mother Teresa wasn’t wrong about laughter. Not to smile is to suffer ceaselessly. There is something like grace in what she says here – “the most important” is to suffer and to laugh.

Down at the bottom of that assessment is paradox: laughter without suffering is silliness; suffering without laughter is horror. Life is a difficult dance between the two, a balancing act.

I was young when B. J. told me about his regrets, young enough to remember what he advised: Learning to laugh is a hard lesson, he said, smiling.