Levitas!

Rev. Jeffrey Symynkywicz, March 29, 2009

Reading

Cardinal Albino Luciani, who later became Pope John Paul I, once wrote:

All [forms of] joy are recommended to Christians, so that they search for them, cultivate them, and protect them against the snares of sadness, depression, and letting oneself go. They are worthwhile in themselves, and can be a great help in living a good life. “Gloomy faces,” said St. Philip Neri, “are not made for the happy house of paradise.”

…We know that hope and joy are twin sisters… St. Thomas Aquinas enlarges the discourse when he speaks of the virtue he calls “jacunditas” and which Aristotle called “eutrapelia”. “Be cheerful,” he recommended, “be able to change things heard and seen into a cheerful smile (to the extend and in the way appropriate.”

“Eutrapeila or cheerfulness,” he explained, is “to change into a cheerful smile all things heard and seen.”… [Even] “To be a comedian,” adds St. Thomas , is not something forbidden, as long as one’s purpose is to amuse people.” Mark Twain with his humorous papers; Chaplin with his both brilliant and apt impersonations; Goldoni with his comedies; all would have been able to become saints, according to St. Thomas, if they had added to their art and genius the right intention and the exercise of other Christian virtues. We would then have had in them attractive and smiling Holy Patron Saints, wo teach Christians how they can and must smile. We have need of them. In the face of so much vulgarity today, alas, what Tommaseo said is valid, “The Italians are like old toothless women; they cannot laugh without spitting.” St. Thomas even affirms that… excessive seriousness can be a sin: “Those persons sin who do not participate in jokes, who say nothing to make others laugh, and they end by being annoying to whoever is speaking because they do not react well to moderate jokes.”

Therefore, the Christian and the “homoludens” (the cheerful man) get on well together… And also the Christian and the smiling man, as St. Augustine spoke of “hilaritas” as a necessary component of [faith], as St. John Bosco always had written in his breviary the biblical maxim: “There is nothing better in life than to rejoice and to act well.”

…As St. Therese wrote in imitation of St. Elias the prophet: God does not necessarily come to us in the hurricane of extraordinary graces, but rather, with a gentle breeze [of a smile or laugh].

The Sermon:

That’s such a happy song that we just sang. It has such a good attitude:

‘Tis a gift to be simple,
‘tis a gift to be free,
‘tis a gift to come down
where we ought to be…
when we find ourselves
in a place just right,
‘twill be in a valley of love and delight.

“A valley of love and delight”: what a delicious image that is. I’ve always thought to myself, “Yes, that’s where we ought to live our lives: in a lush, abundant valley, flowing over with the fruits of love and the flowerings of de-light.”

It’s all about lightness—levitas in Latin—joy is. “The incredible lightness of being,” the Czech writer Milan Kundera called it in his philosophical novel (a book which, to my little brain at least, exhibited an incredible heaviness and density of being; I don’t think I ever got far beyond the title, actually—which I loved): the incredible lightness of our beings, when we let them be light; when we let go of our need to control, and remain earthbound; when we rise like the blithe, airy spirits we really are, inside.

 Now, of course, the Shakers, who gave us that lovely little song, were a curious bunch:

On the one hand, many of their worship services consisted completely of dancing—nothing but dancing. No long, boring, heavy sermons; no dense theologizing; no involved, convoluted ponderings on the meaning of life; indeed, no talk, talk, talk, at all; no prayers, even—just dancing.

Dancing can be a pretty direct road to right side of our brains certainly, and from there, perhaps, toward that “valley of love and delight”. If you’ve ever lost yourself in the mad whirl of the dance at a wedding reception, or at a Christmas party, you know what I mean. Maybe the Shakers had a point, spiritually speaking.

But before you all go run out and put on your dancing shoes, and convert to Shakerism, I would also remind you that our friends the Shakers, who were so into dancing and joy and the simple gifts of life, also believed in total abstinence as far as sex was concerned. Which limited their appeal somewhat (it also didn’t do much for growth in their church schools, certainly). So, they may have chosen their own extinction as a community of faith. It also seems to me that they slammed shut one pretty big door on genuine human joy, not to mention pleasure, which good, healthy sex (physically healthy; emotionally healthy; spiritually healthy) can provide us.

The Shakers seem to have been somewhat conflicted. “Join the club!” we can all tell them. We’re all conflicted about some things, I guess. But the Shakers did leave us that wonderful song, at least (and some rather nice furniture). They also remind us to remember to look upon life, sometimes at least, as that “valley of love and delight” which it can be. They remind us, too, to remember to step lightly upon this earth, and to dance—dance—wherever we may be.

Certainly, this is good advice for those of us who don’t find ourselves dancing through life often enough; those of us who take ourselves—and life in general—way too seriously sometimes. Sometimes, we seem hell-bent on burying ourselves under our own weight, under a sense of our own gravitas—our own heaviness (and I don’t mean just physical).

I am hardly a cock-eyed optimist when it comes to life, and the older I get, the more I understand the traditional view of this earthly existence as a “vale of tears”—because, very often, that’s what it is… Maybe 60% of the time; maybe 40%… Ten points this way or that, depending on who’s in the White House at a particular time, perhaps… Who knows how much for sure? But a lot certainly. As the Buddha said, “All life is suffering,” and while that might sound a little extreme for some of us, even the most optimistic among us has to admit that we do an awful lot of letting go in these lives of ours: One after another, we are called upon to let go of those we love. We let go of our children, as they grow older and take up lives of their own. We let go of those we’ve loved and lived with for the better parts of our lives. We let go of relationships that don’t work anymore. We let go of our most cherished hopes and dreams and expectations. One after another, the parts of our aging bodies force us to let go of being able to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it. We let go of so many of our expectations of what this life will be.

Sure, the older I get, the more you can make the case to me that this life is a vale of tears, and only the most hapless Pollyanna cam deny that sometimes (oftentimes) this life just isn’t very much fun, and only a fool laughs in the face of much of the genuine heartbreak of this world. Jesus wept. And so do we.

But if we are honest, we also need to remind ourselves that the pain of life is only part of the story. No pain lasts forever, either; even the greatest pain will, sooner or later, be stilled. We who suffer, and those whom we love who suffer, will sooner or later find eternal rest and peace. It is said that as she lay dying, at the relatively young age of 69, Katherine Lee Bates (the woman who wrote “America the Beautiful”, and a rather large woman in later life, apparently) decided to be cremated. Dear Katherine was so much of a control freak, that she even chose the urn in which her ashes would be contained, and had it brought to her on her death bed. As she inspected the urn, Katherine sighed wistfully, and she told those present around her bedside: “Just think of how light I’ll finally ,” be.”

There will come a day for all of us when we will be that light—and when the only work we’ll have left is as spirits “dancin’ in a sky filled with light”. But why wait for death to experience that lightness of being? Why wait to experience that joy?  

Even if we concede the valley of tears 50 or 60 percent of our lives’ landscapes, that still leaves us a lot of space for constructing something else. Even the Buddha, who taught that “all life is suffering”, also knew that there was a great deal of joy in life, as well. (Think of all those “laughing Buddha” statues you’ve seen in garden shops or nurseries or at the Christmas tree shop: you know, the ones where the Big Guy with the great big belly is sitting there with that big smile on his face, seemingly overcome by convulsions of laughter and joy and mirth. This is the guy who taught “All life is suffering”? Sort of like the sexless Shakers spending all their time… dancing, of all things!)

“Life is suffering” the Buddha seems to be telling us—but laugh anyway! Because perhaps the deepest, truest laughs also contains the sighs and sorrows of our lives, as well. It’s when we know the pain that life often brings—the heartache, the bitter pills, the loss, the grief—and when we don’t run from it—and when we don’t medicate it away, or bury it under our addiction of choice—then the inescapable joy of life, when it does arise, comes from someplace deeper—somewhere true—and our bellies and our bodies can shake with laughter—just like the Buddha’s does.

The road of life may often lead us through the valley of tears. But maybe—just maybe—there’s another valley—a “valley of love and delight”—waiting for us on the other side of the tears.

But to get there, we have to travel lightly. Have you ever gone on a trip and taken way too much baggage along? I have, numerous times (probably most times I’ve gone on trips, actually). I especially remember the sabbatical my family and I took to Mexico back in 1992. We drove in our mini-van from Maine to Mexico; we were going to be gone a few months; so—of course—we had to bring everything with us: our own food; extra water; clothes for Maine, clothes for Mexico, clothes for every place and every season in between; school books for the kids; books for us to read, magazines, correspondence to catch up on; lots of music for all five of us; cameras and film; notebooks and guidebooks and devotional books and an iron, and a hair dryer, and a toaster, and a portable grill, and pots and pans, laundry supplies, and lots and lots of Tupperware, and plastic bags, and snacks, and drinks, and a cooler, and a picnic basket (that kept falling out of the car every time we opened the door)—and, oh yes—five individual human beings, of various sizes and shapes, all crammed into the empty spaces amidst that stuff in the car.

It’s no wonder that some of our kids don’t speak to us any more!

Sometimes, to get to the valley of delight, we have to travel a lot more lightly than we usually do. We need less baggage. Fewer heavy ideas. Fewer pre-conceived notions and prejudices.  Fewer isms and ideologies. “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” Mary Poppins sang. And a good dose of levitas can sure help lubricate our wheels as we cruise through life. Levitas acts as a sort of mineral oil of our spirits.

 Levitas can also help us live longer. It’s downright healthy, and good for us! There’s nothing like laughter to transform an overly-heavy or draining or taxing experience, and get the juices of life flowing again. “Laughter is the best medicine,” the Reader’s Digest used to tell us—and (for those of us of a certain age, at least) if it’s in the Reader’s Digest, it must be true. According to Paul McGhee, a well known play therapist (sounds like a fun job), laughter provides four important spiritual gifts for us:

First of all—laughter lowers our ego boundaries; it gets us outside of ourselves; it frees us from the trap of self-consciousness, from being overly concerned with our little problems, our point-of-view, our need to control every aspect of a situation. Laughter creates a truly classless society.

Second, laughter helps us to let go; it connects us with bigger, wider forces in life.

Third, laughter connects us with those around us. A smile makes a wonderful bridge; when we laugh together, our laughter becomes one with that of those around us; we share the breath of life with each other. We engage the beings of others; our humanity meets and merges with theirs.

And fourth, laughter revitalizes us; it uplift us; it give us a new surge of energy, and hopefulness. It even oxidizes our blood!

When we engage life with an attitude of playfulness, we are bidding the angel inside ourselves to come out and play and take our place, if only for a little while. And, as G.K. Chesterton said, angels can fly, you know, precisely because they take themselves so lightly. They know what levitas really means.

“The joy that isn’t shared dies young,” Anne Sexton reminds us, and, as another writer has put it: “Love isn’t love till you give it away”. Neither is joy.

But the joy of sharing doesn’t come out of a sense of sacrifice and martyrdom (though each of those has an honored place  in our human epic). It sure doesn’t arise from a sense of drear duty and joyless responsibility.

It arises, rather, from a deep understanding that joy is not a heavy stone, but a flowing stream. By practicing acts of kindness and compassion, and by exercising the virtues of jacunditas and hilaritas and levitas-- as no less than the Fathers of the Church command-- we enlarge our own beings; we expand our souls—probably more directly than through any other form of human endeavor. Is it possible to feel any better than when we do something to make another person smile, or to share a laugh with someone we care about, or even with a complete stranger? Are ever more human than when we are laughing? Are we ever more alive?

Nothing on this Earth compares to the human communion of lives shared. It is the closest we come on Earth, I believe, to knowing the kingdom of heaven. It is our kingdom of days.

May we, too, all of us, become lighthearted messengers of love in this old world; may we be apostles of joy; ambassadors of mirth. May we, too, be that little breeze, the little smile which, though delicate, can remind others of the love of God. May we, too, endeavor to be hints of springtime in the midst of a world that is far too often cold and wintry. May we bring just a bit of comfort and joy, hope and courage, to this world of ours; and in so doing may we, each one of us, shine forth as just a little bit of heaven’s light—and heaven’s lightness--  in this blessed moment we share.

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