But at Christmas there was no puppy under the tree. As the boy played contentedly with the toys he did get, his mother said, “I guess God didn’t answer your prayers.”
“He answered me,” the boy told her. “He just said no.”
“That’s a cute story, don’t you think?” my mother said, chuckling, then glancing at me to see if I got it.
I got it. It was a moral. It was an Aesop’s fable for little Christians. It was her way of telling me that I wasn’t going to get the puppy I’d been whining for and that I might as well stop walking around the house belting out, “How much is that doggie in the window, the one with the waggly tail?”
My mother loved the anecdote because it showed a model child bowing humbly to God’s better judgment. It also conflates parents and God, because it’s not God who drives to the pound and gets the mutt. It’s Mom and Dad. How stupid did she think I was?
I was indignant that the mother in the story was just pushing the blame for her decision off on the Almighty. Even when I was ten, the psychological vacuity of the weakly humorous anecdote and the emotional manipulation in it left me raw with contempt.
That smarmy boy knew nothing of desire and disappointment,
I thought, though I couldn’t find the words for it then. I knew what it was like to have balked passions—or at least, balked greed—and I knew that even on those rare times when I accepted disappointment with seeming grace, I did it only after swallowing a bitter mouthful of resentment. The little plaster saint of Mom’s joke infuriated me, but he also admonished me irrefutably, and I bowed to the point: Prayers were not always granted. We are guaranteed only that God will listen, not that he will oblige. I hated the joke for making me see what no sermon, no matter how compelling, would ever make me acknowledge, much less understand.
At least the pious anecdote gave me something to chew over. Humor and religion were married, it seemed, but not altogether faithfully. Behind religion’s back, the really funny jokes went on savage benders every Saturday night with punch lines of easy virtue, and then on Sunday morning they slumped in the back row of church, nursing a hangover, and worrying if they had caught a dose.
The jokes I heard in Sunday school, by contrast, were so insipid that I didn’t even groan when I heard them.
Where is baseball first mentioned in the Bible? In the big inning, Eve stole first, Adam stole second, and Cain struck out Abel.
Where is tennis first mentioned in the Bible? When Joseph served in Pharaoh’s court.
Who was the greatest comedian in the Bible? Samson. He brought the house down.
Where is cannibalism first mentioned? 2 Kings 8:1.
Who is the fastest man in the Bible? Adam. He was first in the human race.
Who was the first person to drive a sports car in the Bible? Joshua. His Triumph was heard throughout the land.
Where was Solomon’s temple located? On the side of his head.
What kind of car did Jesus drive? He drove the moneychangers out of his father’s house in his Fury.
(I have to admit, though, that I was fond of the imaginary Christian plush toy we joked about: “Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear”—a pun on the hymn “Gladly the Cross I’d Bear.”)
Still, the bad jokes in Sunday school topped the torpor of sitting in church, waiting for something interesting to happen. No matter what I did, I was bored, bored, bored. I read the bulletin till I was furious with tedium. Who cared when the Adult Bible Study group was meeting and who had donated the lovely floral displays at the front of the church? If I kicked the pew in front of me or jostled my brother, trying to claim more space, Mom pinched me, thumped me with her finger, popped my thigh, or jabbed me in the side with her elbow. “Sit still and pay attention,” she hissed. “Just wait till I get you home, young man!”
Momentarily chastened, I studied the pictures in my Bible of Jesus blessing the children, Jesus feeding the hungry multitudes, Jesus bearing the cross to Golgotha, and then I quietly creased the
bulletin into a minutely pleated accordion and silently tore it into one-eighth-inch strips. Sometimes I chewed the strips as I tore them off. Sometimes I took the damp paper out of my mouth and studied the impressions my teeth had clenched into the sodden wad of pulp.
Maybe I am destined to be a dentist
, I thought.
The preacher’s microscopically close analysis of Bible verses went on and on. The state of our souls—miserable—was too depressing to contemplate. And the terrors of judgment and the increasing likelihood of my burning eternally in perdition—“like a pork roast on a grill”—disturbed me so much that I concentrated on not hearing them. But early in the sermon, warming us up for the brimstone to follow, the preacher often paused and smiled self-deprecatingly, letting us know he was going to tell a story. I stopped fidgeting and listened. Sometimes he simply told a cute anecdote about something that had happened in the news that week, but often he told a joke. And then I knew I’d have something to think about for the rest of the sermon.
Many times I heard from Baptist pulpits the story—it was a great crowd pleaser—of the farmer caught in a flood. As the waters rose around his isolated farmhouse, the farmer moved to the second story of his house and then onto the roof, where he perched, prayed, and waited for God to save him.
His neighbors rowed over in their fishing skiff and asked if he wanted to get in with them, but he replied no, he had prayed to God for help and God was going to save him.
They left, and as the waters kept rising, the farmer prayed even more fervently. The sheriff’s department puttered up in a motorboat, rescuing stranded flood victims, and again the farmer sent them away. He had asked God to save him and he was waiting for God.
Swirling brown water now lapped onto the roof, and a National Guard helicopter circled overhead. Through a loudspeaker, the
guardsmen offered to send down a ladder. But once more the pious old farmer, who had climbed onto the chimney, waved them off.
As the water sucked at his boots and then started creeping up the legs of his overalls, the farmer, giving way to doubt, called up to the sky, “God, I thought you were going to rescue me.”
The sky opened. A bright light shined out of the sky, and God said, “I’ve already sent two boats and a helicopter. . . .”
When I first heard the story of the stranded farmer, I laughed and thought what I was supposed to think:
Yeah, why can’t the old guy just accept the way God has answered his prayer? God helps those who help themselves
. But as the preacher moved on into his sermon, I kept pondering the story, worrying over it. I knew I was supposed to take the obvious lesson from it and move on. But I saw the farmer’s point of view. When God admonished the presumptuous farmer, he was also correcting our definition of grace. Was the story telling us that the days of direct, divine intervention in our lives were over and we could only count on each other? Did God now only work through people? Why wouldn’t the farmer, after a lifetime of belief and obedience to God, want the Almighty to reveal himself in his servant’s time of greatest need? I was only twelve, but I wanted to see God. I wanted that reassurance. If God only worked through people, maybe there was no God. Maybe those saviors in boats and helicopters weren’t God’s agents but just people doing their jobs. That was a hard and frightening idea for a boy brought up as a believer.
Hadn’t God sent this flood, as he had sent the flood in Genesis and then intervened to save the one good man, Noah, in his ark filled with animals? But instead of being Noah, as he had imagined, this poor proud farmer found himself to be Job, a man endangered so he would ask for help and be taught a lesson that would edify others. Under all my thinking lay the Calvinist understanding that everything is a test from God. And that led to an inescapable and
terrifying corollary: God’s grace and God’s malice are often indistinguishable. If the farmer hadn’t asked, would God have let him drown? And what about all the other people who were flooded out of their houses—what did they learn?
Maybe I wouldn’t have worried over this joke so much, but these questions about who and what God is and how he works in the world were exactly the questions troubling me daily. I was surrounded by believers who never seemed anguished in their faith. The gap between the hard, obvious God of the Old Testament and the vague God of the modern world troubled me. The chasm between story and actuality, joke and the real world, was what I was struggling to plumb. Where did the one stop and the other begin? Where did they overlap and what did it mean when and that they did?
Nobody raised questions about the preacher’s jokes and anecdotes. Nobody else, so far as I could tell, even had these questions waft through their minds, like eye-floaters drifting through their field of vision, so I assumed my mind was aberrant. In fact, the apostle Paul told me that I was a sinner for thinking such thoughts, so I kept quiet. But I could not stop my mind from thinking, and I began to perceive its processes as both the essence of myself and somehow autonomous, beyond my control.
If you think I’m making too much of a simple joke, you are of course right—and wrong. The preachers analyzed the parables of Jesus much more closely, and that joke is nothing if not a parable. Biblical exegesis considers everything. As a boy, I heard—twice, from different preachers in different states—sermons that explicated the Lord’s Prayer one phrase at a time over a year. Week One: a thirty-minute sermon on the phrase “Our Father.” Week Two: “Who Art in Heaven.” Week Fifty-two: “Amen.” I have heard Christ’s parables analyzed from just about every angle imaginable, including the story of the prodigal son considered from the viewpoint of the
pigs in their sty as the destitute drunk settles down next to them for the night. “Whoa,” said the pigs, “why is this Jew, a man who has abjured pork in all its forms, sleeping here in the mud with us? Is he trying to steal our slop? There must be something wrong with him.” I learned the same kind of close reading from a book suggested by my pastor, who had noticed my susceptibility to jokes:
The Gospel According to Peanuts
.
The congregation always laughed at the joke about the farmer in the flood, though, and I laughed with them. So did my father. In church, my father relaxed. At a joke from the pulpit, his round pink face lit up. Jokes told in the sanctuary would not be sexual or violent, and they always made a point, a point that was instructive, moral, and, at least on the surface, tame. The anarchy of pointless wordplay and bizarre imagery was left outside the vestibule. Church humor did not tear down; it built up.
When my father chuckled, I studied how his lips drew upward as the cheek muscles lifted toward his eyes and the flow of blood into his cheeks made his face glow rosy and soft, unlike the vibrant red flush when he got angry. The near silence of his amusement fascinated me. I laughed from my gut. I was an hysterical laugher. I laughed till I wept. But my father controlled his laughs as he controlled everything but his temper. In church, an amused chuckle wouldn’t diminish his dignity and authority in the eyes of his children. When he smiled in church, he relaxed his jaw enough that I could see the blue breach where one of his molars had been extracted.
The death of my sister sowed such hidden sorrow that I grew up in a house deeply deficient in what Arthur Koestler called the “luxury reflex” of laughter. But when my father’s brothers, Uncle Herschel and Uncle Bob, blew through town, mild anarchy was loosed upon our home. Though Herschel was a Methodist minister and Bob later became one, they always said it was my father who
was the religious Hudgins, the one who everyone assumed would be a preacher, a possible life that bewildered me with its unsuitability. Dad had the faith and the intensity of a preacher, but he entirely lacked the glad-handing gifts of the salesman, the ease with other people, and the stage presence that good preachers relish. Around his brothers and their faith, though, he relaxed and laughed, knowing their humor, like church humor, was safe. In fact, their humor often
was
church humor.
Most preachers I’ve known possess a finely articulated, if circumscribed, sense of humor. Humor is a staple of the pulpit, of course, but it’s also social grease for people in the public eye—genial humor that is, not too judgmental, more or less harmless. It’s wordplay for well-educated people who love words, stories, and public speaking, but know the bounds in which they work. Like his brothers, Dad was raised Methodist, but my mother’s family was Baptist. During a Baptist service in Southern California, I was convinced of the magnitude of my sins and staggered, blubbering, down the aisle to join the church. Dad took my salvation as a sign that he should become a Baptist. After that, my Uncle Herschel, the Methodist minister, delighted in telling his newly Baptist brother the joke about the Baptist who argued that anything less than a full dunking did not count as baptism in his eyes or in the eyes of God.
A Methodist replied that he thought a little sprinkle of water on the top of the head would do the job just fine.
The outraged Baptist responded that that was ridiculous. Jesus was fully immersed by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, and we had to take Jesus as our model.
“Wouldn’t it be okay to take someone in the water only up to his chest?” the Methodist asked.
“No!”
“How about to the neck?”
“No!”
“Well, how about if you held him in the water till he was almost completely immersed, with just his head barely sticking out?
“No!”
“See!” cries the Methodist, triumphantly. “I told you that the sprinkle on the top was what counted.”
You have to be pretty deeply involved in church doctrine to appreciate the wit. The joke toys good-naturedly with doctrinal issues that churches and denominations split over, but, because it pokes almost as much fun at the Methodist’s skewed logic as the Baptist’s doctrinal vehemence, the joke’s real point is that such minor issues aren’t worth fighting over. While seeming to tweak my father for becoming a Baptist while his brothers had remained Methodists, Herschel was actually saying it didn’t matter, and they all shared a companionable laugh.