Laughing At Ourselves

Rev. Amy Russell - 2008-11-30

Laughing at Ourselves
Rev. Amy Russell
November 30, 2008
Have you ever gone on a business trip, opened your suitcase at the hotel, only to find that you brought one black shoe and one brown shoe?
I have.
Have you ever shown up at a friend’s house for dinner right at 6:30 when you were invited and have them come to the door in their bathrobe? Apparently, you came on the wrong Saturday?
I have.
Have you ever introduced your sister to a friend using your name to identify her instead of her name?
I have.
We all do stupid and embarrassing things and while they seem at the moment to be so stupid you just want to curl up and hide, you get over it and live to laugh about it later.
So often we compare ourselves to others and see that they are thinner, prettier, they have a better job, they have more friends, and we see ourselves as hopelessly inferior. We feel like we will never be thin enough, good-looking enough, smart enough to actually be acceptable to others. This is why Wavy Gravy, the comedian and political satirist of the sixties said that we’re all just “bozos on the bus”.
Elizabeth Lesser celebrates this way of looking at ourselves. She says, “We are all half-baked experiments- mistake prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. ..
This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration. If we’re all bozos, then for God’s sake, we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos. We can approach the problems that visit bozo-type beings without the usual embarrassment and resistance. …” (Lesser, Broken Open, p. 28)
I have to admit to feeling like a bozo when I meet up with a group of colleagues who seem to be so much smarter and more well-informed, and certainly more “in the know” than I can ever be. Being a Unitarian Universalist minister is sometimes a difficult job to hold when you see so many other ministers who seem to have figured it all out. I especially feel this way when I’m new in a group of colleagues.
When I accepted my first call to a congregation in DC and started attending meetings with the many colleagues in the area, I felt overwhelmed by so many of them who had large congregations, many years of experience, and who knew each other well. I felt very left out and stupid. I felt like I had made a big mistake in attempting to do a job that would certainly take a smarter and more savvy individual than myself.
After a couple of meetings with this group, feeling very much like a bozo on the bus, I decided I would just have to get over this feeling and make some effort to make friends. So, I approached the woman minister who was settled in the church nearest mine in a suburb in Maryland. I explained to her that I was new in the area and new to ministry and would love to pick her brain about her ministry. I suggested that perhaps we could have lunch someday. She sighed and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t eat lunch. I just don’t have time.” Then she walked away.
I kid you not. I never felt more humiliated than I did at that moment. In fact, I had to excuse myself and hide in the bathroom for a few minutes just to recover. And I decided that I just didn’t belong in that group. I started skipping meetings. I doubted that I really had it in me to compete in this arena. While I felt confident in my small friendly church, I pretty much kept to myself.
Once when I got up my courage to attend another meeting, a man who I knew was minister at one of the biggest churches in the DC area came over and welcomed me to the area. He said that he had been meaning to ask me to have lunch so that he could welcome me properly. I was amazed. There was someone who actually was friendly to me. Maybe I wasn’t such a bozo after all. I guess I had decided that not only were these people not friendly but that I wasn’t worth their consideration either.
We went to lunch and talked. He was so helpful and encouraging to me. He told me about when he had taken his first congregation and how many mistakes he had made. How he had offended a member who was of the biggest givers in the congregation. How he had forgotten to take his sermon text with him one Sunday and had to make it up as he went along. All of his stories said one thing to me. That he was a bozo on the bus, too. That everyone feels this way at times during their lives. And that we can forgive ourselves and realize that we’re not perfect. No one is.
What a relief that was to me.
Wanting to feel “normal” and as competent and self-assured as we think other people are is for many a life long journey that goes no where. So many of us grasp at that idea that there is a “normal” state of life that we can someday reach. A place where the bills get paid on time, our children are happy and well-adjusted, and we finally come into our own and feel satisfied with our selves and our lives. Certainly, many of us get to a state where we experience happiness in our lives. But to always feel “normal” is something that many of us have totally given up on. Especially Unitarian Universalists. Somehow many of us have felt out of step with the rest of the world for so long, that we have accepted it.
But it takes a while to get to that acceptance. Elizabeth Lesser describes in her book, Broken Open, how she came to this acceptance. After her divorce, she felt so out of step with the world, like she was broken and didn’t know how to find that normal life again. One day as she sat staring into a fire, she settled into her sadness.
I sat there, letting these cold facts chill my heart as the fire warmed my face. In the stillness, with nothing to distract me, an all too familiar feeling of despair descended and hijacked my heart. But instead of getting up, washing the dishes or calling a friend, I let myself sink into the think soup of shame and sadness. Tears pooled in my eyes and fell down my cheeks. “How long do I have to feel like this?” I asked the flames. I laughed, and I threw my hands up and announced, “ I give up. I am not normal, I’ll never be normal again.”…
“May I toss my yearning for normal into the flames?” I asked the Phoenix in the fire. “Will you burn it to bits and show me a new way?” (Lesser, Broken Open, p. 150)
She soon reconciled herself with the fact that there wasn’t a normal. That being divorced and worrying about her kids through the process was just another journey in life that many people lived through. That she would emerge through the flames of this experience to become who she was, nor normal, but very much herself.
In our fear that we are not normal, we try to control everything around us as an effort to appear normal. We go out of our way to hide whatever we are experiencing, because if we showed that we were having a rocky time, we’d confirm our worst fears- that in fact we’re not normal and never will be.
When people are having a difficult time, sometimes they need to show a brave face to the world just to keep from losing control. I understand that this is often true. When we feel so out of control is the time when we feel we must not show it. And that’s okay. As long as we find a way to express our fears and insecurities to someone. Sharing our fears and our difficulties can often be the way we discover that we are not alone. That someone else has experienced what we are going through. And when we see that the other person appears normal, has in fact, lived through the crazy time and is okay, sometimes that is when we see the light at the end of the tunnel. We can begin to realize that “normal life” is a falsehood that doesn’t really exist. Our craziness may be different from others, but we are not the only crazy ones.
Realizing that we have no control over a situation sometimes allows us to let go and just laugh at the situation. Eleanor Wiley writes about a friend of hers, Sandra, whose house burned down. It certainly was not a laughing matter. It was tragic, she had lost everything. Her friends gathered around her to comfort her and to help her go through the devastation and see what could be salvaged. As friends would find little objects that they thought she might want to save they would bring them to her. Eleanor found a statue of “Quan Yin” the Buddhist Goddess of love and compassion. The head of the statue had been knocked off. She took the statue to her friend knowing that it had been a favorite treasure of Sandra’s. Sandra took a look at the headless goddess and laughed, saying, “I guess this is a reminder that nothing is permanent. You really can’t control anything, try as you might.” (Wiley, Eleanor, There Are No Mistakes, p. 49-50) Nothing is permanent and as we constantly try to make things stay the same, it’s like trying to stir wet cornstarch, the more we push, the more resistance we get.
When I was a new widow, one of the most difficult things for me was going to the grocery store. I wanted to pretend that everything was just as it always had been. Going to the grocery is a sign that you’re getting back to a “normal life”, I felt. I could show people that I could go on with my life. I remember one time in the first months of being a widow, coming down the cereal aisle and starting to look for the cereal that my husband had liked, then realizing that I didn’t need that cereal anymore. I bent over with tears, dropped my basket, and ran out of the store. I felt so stupid and so out of control that it took me a few more days before I could return to finish my shopping.
When I told my sister-in-law the story of how I had done this and how stupid I felt, she suggested that I go to the store and buy that kind of cereal and put it in the cupboard with a sign “Scott’s cereal” written on it, just to remind me that I will always be missing him, and that’s normal.
Being out of control is a scary place to be. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told someone who was grieving a loved one or grieving a lost job to allow themselves some time “out of control”. Crying, throwing things, even yelling out loud your anger at the situation is a way to express our out of control-ness. We feel that nothing is in our control and that life will never be “normal” again. So, why not complain about that? Loudly. Being out of control ourselves is an expression of how out of control our lives feel.
Buddhist monk, Chogyam Trunpa, talks about how we could deal with our constant anxiety. He says that when we are feeling very anxious about something, we should allow ourselves to feel that. Then to feel the sadness about what we are anxious about. Then the tears come. And with the sadness and the tears that we then can feel peering through, the clarity that we have within. The understanding that life cannot be sanitized, that it’s always messy and we’re always going to have anxiety. We don’t need to run away from our fear, we can accept it and sit with it until it becomes our acceptance of life as it is. (From Broken Open, Elizabeth Lesser)
If we are as Elizabeth Lesser says “mistake-prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. ..”, then we have to realize that making mistakes, being out of control, feeling not-normal is a “normal” way of being. That in fact, most of us spend a great deal of our lives in this place. It’s okay.
Accepting our inability to figure it all out now is the greatest gift we can be given. Knowing how much we don’t know and being okay with that is a true sign of maturity. Accepting that life is ever-changing and therefore, never really in control is probably one of the highest spiritual states that we can reach. We may only reach this state of acceptance for a short time, and then we may fall back into our desire to be normal and in control. Perhaps we can remind ourselves again and again that we are only “bozos on the bus” and so is everyone else.
I love the poem I read today by Hafiz, a fourteenth century poet. The image of myself as a great big fat person trying to balance myself in a boat next to God as a big fat person and laughing hysterically. To me this poem says, “I am as holy as the divine, just as I am. And I need not take myself so seriously.”