by Gerald May

In the last newsletter I spoke of my most abject, despondent moment of suffering in chemotherapy. I was lying on the floor, coughing and sobbing, when I heard a voice say, "What we're really here for is fun."

I was as certain as I could be that it was God's voice. After an instant of shock, I was overwhelmed with uncontrollable giggles which, combined with my coughs and tears, nearly choked me. After I had caught my breath and quieted, I thought again of Bosnia--the place with which I felt strangely connected throughout the chemotherapy. "Fun?" I asked silently, "If we're really here for fun, what about Bosnia? Surely you can't expect me to see any fun in that! Maybe if you had said 'resurrection' or even 'joy,' but what you said was fun!"

My memory, as if responding to my own question, went back to a day during my visit to Bosnia two years ago. Our little group of American pilgrims were visiting an elderly couple who had lost nearly all their children and grandchildren in the fighting. The old woman was bedridden, but she sat up to tell us their story. Her husband sat silently next to me, wiping his eyes with an old bandanna as he relived the tragedy with her. We were all profoundly moved by the depth of their suffering; we cried with the old woman as she spoke. When she finished, we sat in silence as she tried to ease the sobbing from her breath. Then she looked up and caught the eye of one of the men in our group. He winked at her and later said he had no idea why he did it. She responded with a wink of her own, a great toothless grin, and a stream of words that the translator could barely keep up with. She said the man was flirting with her and she thought he was pretty good-looking himself, but they should behave themselves because her husband was there in the room.

Within moments, everyone was laughing and crying and having such fun it was impossible to tell what our tears were about. I felt the old man's hand pat my knee. Grinning widely, he nodded for us to follow him outside. He showed us how he sharpened scythes for a living, and had great fun showing off his tools and his craft. And I had great fun with him.

As I thought back on it, I remembered times I'd visited sick friends, or more recently when friends visited me when I was sick, and what fun we had together. It wasn't the superficial fun that comes from denying suffering, but the full-bodied delight that arises from facing the totality of what is, as awful or as beautiful as it may be. Then something happens, a wink out of nowhere, and the fun begins. Or perhaps we join the fun that's always going on.

Since hearing that voice, I have thought a lot about the meaning of fun. "Joy," the word I would have expected from God, comes from roots that imply pleasure about something, as in rejoicing over a victory. Fun also means pleasure, but its roots imply play, as in the fun children have dancing and pretending. The difference is clear: joy is pleasure because of something, but the pleasure of fun has no special cause. It just happens.

Scripture is full of references to joy: rejoicing over healing, salvation, or any of God's other many blessings. Fun is a different matter. The word didn't even appear in the English language until the early 18th century, and is rare even in the most recent translations of the Bible. But I find the essential meaning of fun in the Hebrew root shaa, which forms words translated as both "play" and "delight." A superb example is in the eighth chapter of Proverbs, where Wisdom describes Herself at the time of creation as God's "delight day by day," "ever at play in God's presence," "playing on the surface of God's earth," and "delighting in the children of God."

From this description it seems clear that creation was great fun for God and God's Wisdom, and the voice I heard in my suffering tells me that creation is ongoing and still great fun. It reminds me of the ancient Hindu notion of chidvilas, the vast play of consciousness, the cosmic delight that continually creates and destroys. To put it another way, nowhere is there any evidence that creation is serious business.

I believe we truly are here for fun. I don't expect to comprehend God's fun any more than I can comprehend God's love, but one thing is clear. No matter how much pain, abuse, or injustice we may suffer or cause others to suffer, a certain delightfulness remains within us that can never be destroyed. And somehow, at some point in every situation, there is always an invitation to join the play.

Sometimes I wonder how religion got so serious. How have so many of us become what Quaker scholar Thomas Kelly called "dour old sober sides" in matters of the spirit? Why do we restrain our celebrations and plan them so carefully, making sure they are always tasteful, appropriate, and most importantly, always about something? I could speculate on the reasons, but right now it doesn't feel like fun.

Instead, let me share another memory. I was nine years old when my father died. I remember the trouble he had breathing in his last moments, and how my mother asked me to call an ambulance because she couldn't leave his side. I remember how I felt when our minister confirmed that my father was dead. "We lost him," he said, and that's exactly what I felt. I had lost my dad, would never hear his laugh or feel his hand on my shoulder again. I missed him terribly. I cried from a grief I could barely understand.

When we came back home after his burial, all our relatives gathered there. Everyone was being very nice to me, and I began playing with cousins my age that I hadn't seen for a long time. I was having fun. I had so much fun, in fact, that one of my aunts called me aside and whispered sternly, "You'd better calm down or people will think you're happy that your father died." I immediately went over and sat by my mother and began to cry again. This time the tears were not from grief but from shame.

Now, 47 years later, I rejoice that I have been largely delivered from such shames. Like Thomas Kelly said, "... one tries to keep one's inner hilarity and exuberance within bounds lest, like the people of Pentecost, we be mistaken for being filled with new wine." I find, however, that I am no longer very concerned. In a way, it is new wine.