Still Funny, Still Loud

She has been waiting to get serious since she was about twenty six.

Not miserable. She would want the distinction made. What she has been waiting for is a settling. A certain kind of weight that she has seen in other people and admires enormously and has never once had, where somebody says something in a room and the room quiets down.

She is forty four. She is the reason the room does the opposite.

She has asked to be filled three times over the years, at intervals, always properly and always meaning it. And each time, somewhere underneath, there was a small hope that this would be the thing that brought the weight.

It has not arrived and she is still funny.

At her uncle's wake in October she had a group of six people in the kitchen laughing so hard that somebody had to hold the counter, and she was aware of it happening and could not have stopped it, and afterward, in the car, she felt something she has not been able to name since.

It was not guilt exactly. It was closer to a verdict.

The sentence, unsaid: a deeper person would not be like this.

You may know that car. The room lifted, and something in you filing it as evidence.

Laughing has a time appointed

There is a famous list in Ecclesiastes and almost everybody reads it as being about the passage of time, and it is also making a claim about what has been assigned.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.Ecclesiastes 3:4

Read the pairs. Weep and laugh. Mourn and dance. Four items, two pairs, and the structure of the whole chapter is that each of these has been given a season by God.

Notice that laughing is not the concession in that verse. It is not the thing permitted after the serious business has been attended to. It sits in the same construction as weeping, with the same standing, in a chapter that opens by saying there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.

You are holding something with a time appointed to it, and Ecclesiastes 3:4 puts laughing in the same construction as weeping in a chapter about seasons assigned by God, and it is the Spirit of God who takes an old list and lands it on a woman in a car outside her uncle's wake.

And that matters more at a wake than almost anywhere. She has been half suspecting that the kitchen was a failure of gravity. That verse says it was a season, in an evening that also had weeping in it, and that both were in the assignment.

Weight is not the same as depth

Consider the thing she actually admires, because it is worth separating out and it is not one thing.

There are people in whom a room quiets, and some of them are carrying something real, and some of them are carrying a manner. The two look identical from four feet away and they are not remotely the same, and she has never had a way to tell them apart, so she has been trying to acquire the appearance of the thing.

Depth, in the way Scripture actually describes it, is not a register. It has nothing to do with volume or with pace. The deepest people in the book include a man who danced through a city and a woman who laughed at God and got a son named after it.

And the register she admires is not distributed by God according to depth. It is distributed the way eye color is. There are shallow people who go quiet and profound people who cannot, and eighteen years of trying to acquire the first has no more chance of producing the second than practicing a limp would produce a broken leg.

You have been trying to acquire a manner rather than a substance, because the written word puts laughing in an appointed season rather than in a phase somebody grows out of, and His Spirit is what turns a distinction into a woman stopping a project she started at twenty six.

And notice that the verse assumes both. Nobody in Ecclesiastes 3 is being asked to choose weeping over laughing, or to graduate from one to the other. The whole passage is a description of a life that contains all of it under the hand of God.

You were never asked to trade one for the other, and Ecclesiastes 3 puts both in the same sentence with the same standing, and the same Spirit who inspired the list is the one who fills.

The kitchen at the wake was not a failure

Now the thing in the car, because it deserves a straight answer.

Six people laughing in a kitchen at a wake is not a lapse in reverence. It is what happens in a house where somebody has died and it has been happening in houses for as long as there have been houses, and every single one of those six people went back into the other room slightly more able to stand there.

She did that. Without deciding to, without a technique, in a kitchen, on the worst day her cousins had had in years.

You were doing something in that kitchen rather than failing at something, because Ecclesiastes 3:4 assigns a season to laughing in the same breath as weeping, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief rather than one more thing for a funny woman to be quietly ashamed of.