---

Humor required

Everybody has a relationship with emotion. Most of them are bad relationships. There may have been that one time when emotion really misbehaved in middle school, and the friendship has been strained ever since. Or it might simply be an issue of watching emotion work over all of your friends and wanting no part of it. You might think you have a grand relationship. Emotion is your best of buddies and that's why there aren't any other buddies.

Within the church, almost speaking broadly, there are whole camps with different views of this strange and irrational creature. We have camps where no thought or desire is real and honest unless it originates somewhere near the sensation that lets you know it's time to hit the water closet. If it's not coming from an internal organ below the shoulders, then no one should listen. To avoid hypocrisy is to be true to such sensations, to always obey them, even if it means wetting your emotional pants at the mall. In this world there is no such thing as making a fool of oneself, and most church services are designed to facilitate some form of emotional masturbation. Strip clubs for evangelicals.

Of course I don't really run in those circles. Nobody has asked me about my heart of hearts lately. However, there are certain assumptions and taboos that we have around here, and the heart is one of them. "Reformed Presbyterian" could almost be equated with, "Emotion? She's his embarrassing cousin that managed to get herself in a condition and he doesn't like to talk about it." The Reformed world is one of walking palm pilots with infrared ports pointed at each other, data swapping. You'd think we'd be swapping something useful, like Tetris, or an ancient first-person shooter game, but we're not. Cartesian coordinates only, please. GPS is truth. GPS is beauty.

All in all, our local churches generally partake of one emotional deviancy or another. Luckily we can pick which deviancy best suits us. We can revel in the bawdy house of evangelicalism (the heart massages are free, but you have to be willing). Or we can chain up our emotions and stick them in the basement, torturing them when necessary so as to bring on intellectual gratification. We can be Dostoevsky's Ivan, and a sadist, or we can frolic with Dmitri and never know what we've fathered.

Observe ditch one. Observe ditch two. It is now natural to point out the middle of the road, and draw denominational conclusions. But I'm not going to do it. Instead, look to the lady bug. Look to the poor sugary sweet aphid that she's eating. Look to creation. Look to God, and you will have looked at Laughter.

I am convinced that humor is the one thing that more firmly establishes any person's relationship to emotion than almost anything else. Well-adjusted? Maladjusted? Bitter as thrice used communion wine? All of it comes tumbling out in laughter. ...