I don’t often hear messages from God.
That sentence may be an overstatement, but I am a poet and poets are perennially prone to hyperbole.
While I was putting my daughter to sleep recently I heard what I can only understand as a message from God. This is the focus of this week’s poem.
I am far too serious most of the time. My mind is often running with goals and objectives, with tasks I need to complete. If I am not careful, I can turn everything in my daily life into something that must be gotten through all so I can check the item off the list and collapse into the couch at the end of the day.
At my worst, this has shown up as clinical depression. On a normal day, it shows up as an offputting moodiness.
So God told me to lighten up.
After reflecting on the simple phrase God whispered in my ear, I returned to a quote from G.K. Chesterton in his book Orthodoxy:
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest medieval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet…. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation.
Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One ‘settles down’ into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man ‘falls’ into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky. Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
I don’t often hear messages from God, but it would seem that He is inviting me to Chesterton’s vision. And what better thing to celebrate this week after Easter? There is a tradition in some parts of Christendom to tell jokes on Easter. This Easter laughter (the ancient term is risus paschalis) is meant to highlight the joy and levity of Christ’s victory over Satan and the powers of darkness.
That same joy and levity have infused everything in our world. Can we lighten up and see it?
9. Last night God told me to lighten up. Last night God told me to lighten up. I was sitting on the floor not praying but putting my daughter to sleep, keeping vigil until I heard the hymns of her subtle small-nose snores. The room was pink with nightlight glow, humming with noise machine growl. Ticker tape to-dos fell through my brain. The tasks left undone from the day. The potential in tomorrow’s rain. The lines of failure I retrace again. In a voice like my own, but more true, I heard my directions without judgement: Lighten up. A simple command, less weighty than Thou Shalt Not, more like Let There Be, as easy as resurrection. I am too often trapped under the yoke of seriousness, taking the easy path to solemnity, while Everything is waiting for me to crack up and be free on this green planet spinning in black space around a fireball that shines on the other half of the world while I sit and listen to a serenade of snores from my daughter’s pink-tinted face. The miracle is that I don’t float away on this tidal wave of grace with the birds and angels. It’s a wonder that my feet can walk this earth that is effervescent with the granduer of God.
Lovely poem!