“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” (Matt. 15:26)

If you are looking to cultivate spiritual levity, I suggest authors like G.K. Chesterton, specifically Orthodoxy and A Man Called Thursday and Frederick Beuchner’s The Son of Laughter. For something a bit more artistic try The Abosolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie or Not without Laughter by Langston Hughes. These author’s bear in their souls the laughter and levity of God better than most.

I am particularly fond of Elton Trueblood’s The Humor of Christ. Trueblood interprets the passage of the Cannanite (black, gentile) woman (whom Jesus calls a “dog”) in light of Jesus’ wry sense of humor. This text is often used as a passage about the virtues of persistent prayer. Trueblood sees the text as a redemptive passage about the inclusive nature of God’s Kingdom. Trueblood suggests that Jesus was not seriously calling the Cannanite woman a “dog,” but rather he was poking fun, and therefore, challenging the very system that denigrates this woman, curses her and labels her an outsider. Trueblood suggest that we need a sense of humor to interpret this passage. Jesus was sharing an inside joke with a woman who is seen as a dog by the spiritual elite.

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Any spirituality that forces us to take ourselves too seriously or not seriously enough is dangerous. We are both saint and sinner. Not one or the other, but both. To see both clearly requires a sense of humor. In an attempt to plumb the depths of this tension Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death, says it this way: “Man is a god who shits.” The Psalmist said the same thing with a little more tact.

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.”
Ps. 8:4-5

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