With Levity and Laughter
Children always astound us – they astound me, at least – with their levity, their inherent playfulness. Playfulness assumes margin and abundance. It takes for granted that there’s enough. The freedom to be playful comes with being provided for. By the time we’ve aged into world-consciousness, however, the world has harrowed us, and we’ve lost something of our infancy – enough so that we’re surprised by the presence of that lightness in our children.
Even the children of other species can experience levity – puppies are playful and secure. They astound me with their freedom and their lightness because it so dramatically transcends the mode of survival that life has acquainted us with.
Scarcity and entropy are active dynamics in anyone’s life and in the universe at large. Scarcity is the sparse distribution of resources – water, food, affirmation. People fight each other for what they need because they perceive scarcity. Nations fight over access to natural resources. Children fight for their parent’s attention. We begin to feel that there is not enough. Society resigns itself to mass poverty as normative. Most of us have also felt a scarcity of personal significance or validation and are in some way fighting for it. It’s not a given, we feel; it has to be won.
Entropy is a tendency toward disorder. Apparently, physics, particularly thermodynamics, finds that all things are headed toward “heat death,” or the total disintegration of matter and energy into a general conformity. In other words, the order and structure and energy of everything are actively worn down into disorder and formlessness. Genesis presents the world as initially “formless and void” (1:2). The Hebrew is “tohu wabohu,” a term used elsewhere to refer to desolation and absence, as with a desert or wasteland. According to scripture, disorder and formlessness were the nature of the world before the ordering word of God. Physics indicates that the universe actively trends back toward that formlessness.
The picture is of thoughtless primeval forces. Leave a sandcastle to the mercy of the sea and it will fall. Leave a star to the mercy of a black whole and it will diminish. Beauty dissipates and order crumbles.
I submit this as well – a person feels these wearing forces when their body is given to a disease or their mind to mental illness. You take happiness and security for granted until the moments in which you experience them are scarce between the consuming seasons of depression or the onslaught of pain. All die, and many in their lives want to die because their bodies and minds have by some means been taken down from the order of health to the disorder of illness. They are there better acquainted with the “formless” and the “void.” Life becomes senseless, pointless, absurd.
We take happiness and security and a sense of purpose for granted when we have them but – considering the tendency of all things including our bodies toward entropy – how did order ever happen? How does the universe have any semblance of shape and form? How is there still light in a universe with black holes? How is there beauty when matter itself trends toward shapelessness?
How do children ever have any sense of security and levity? How is joy possible? Certainly, these things depend on multiple strata of intricate order. The human whole is a sophisticated system. Its existence defies the reign of entropy. Personhood, with its capacity to appreciate and enjoy, is an astounding development in a universe otherwise ruled by thoughtless, senseless force. That a human can love – give and receive it – what a miracle is that? That we are more than automatons. That we can know faithfulness in relationships and know the unmerited love of a parent or partner. These facets of human constitution and experience are potent contentions against a universe familiar with scarcity and entropy.
On the canvass of this huge universe with all its entropic force, that anything has any form or function is a miracle. That we humans can see and appreciate it – that is also a miracle. And that we can love and laugh and know any security and levity – that is a miracle of a higher order.
I know there are naturalistic ways of understanding the miracle of existence, but for me, I praise God. Having felt my body fall apart and get to that unkind, visceral place of survival – having felt that entropy, I now value the preciousness of every moment of security. That I can know health is a gift – homeostasis is incredible! My body is a gift and every comfort, relief, medicine, nutrition, counsel, and opportunity for rest, are also a gift. That I can laugh again and spend a day without my mind lost to depression and anxiety, that I have hope – this is a gift. That I have been supported by my family and friends, who despite their own experience of their own scarcities have chosen to hold me in my pain, this is a miracle. That I have been loved and that I have anything within me to love. This is a miracle.
I experienced scarcity and entropy that were brought by mental illness, physical illness, and circumstances. I think that the experience has deepened my appreciation for everything that has not been resigned to entropy and scarcity. The miracle of the universe proclaims the strong arm of God – capable of fashioning form, function, beauty, and even love, out of formlessness and scarcity.
Every moment of security speaks to a God who designs things such that we are not purely animal survivors, but we can actually enjoy things and love one another and know fun and levity. Notably, even animals seem to have the capacity to feel peace and pleasure and love. Every moment of levity we feel speaks to a thousand levels of form complexity – physically, biologically, chemically, spiritually. Life, which includes joy, is an astounding contention against the formlessness of the primeval universe.
God contended with darkness and made light. He contended with formlessness and made life. And behold, he says he is making all things new! He contends too with death. Death would otherwise seem to be entropy’s definitive reclamation of life. It would be but for Christ who overcomes it and numbers it with the “former things” (Rev. 21:1-5). We who are blessed even to breathe and know every miracle of this life that we do, are yet also told of another level to come of God’s creative and redemptive power.
God is well aware of that which works against his designs. He knows entropy and scarcity and their anthropological cousin, sin. He knows the tyranny of these and entered into our experience of their consequence. He humbled himself and became human so to subsume our experience, but he was not overcome by that experience. Death could not hold him, Christians proclaim. He rose and in so doing inaugurated a new order, the fulfillment of which we anticipate soon. Heaven on earth. Death consumed in the context of life. The power of the darkness penned in by the power of everlasting, consuming light. The power of sin consumed in the power of grace.
Like the burning sun, Christ consumes darkness and laughs at the forces which would contend with him. He looks at the span of the universe and does not fear because all its vastness and darkness are only the canvass of his creativity. God shot the darkness through with light, made form where there was formlessness, and imbued the creatures of his world with the capacity to know security and love. He can do this and more.
The present experience of entropy and scarcity remind me of the beauty of all that stands above those forces. It’s grace and miracle that have allowed the levity we see in our children. With levity and laughter, they enjoy the order and light God made in defiance of scarcity and entropy. With levity and laughter, Christ sustains these and promises even more.
image cropped from Marahorian Dan’s, “Galaxy Structure”