New Societies and Gallows Humor

I could blame this one on my court, but it’s one of those things where my temperament, the temperament of my court, and life have colluded to make me a bit rough around the edges. My humor is both highly sarcastic and dark. Someone has to make a joke when things get too serious.

I’ve had to leave funerals because I was failing to keep a straight face. I am not safe to make eye contact with whenever things are supposed to be solemn or serious.

People are often surprised that a priest has a sense of humor that goes the (offensive) places mine does. There is an idea in many cultures that a priest is someone who is a more pure, more elevated (for them, someone who no longer needs to do anything gross or ‘unclean’) type of person. Priests intervene with the divine and the divine is pure, therefore the priest must be pure, and other things of that nature. And, of course, everything can be divided into good and evil, right and wrong, clean and unclean, etc.

Same Abrahamic bullshit with categories. Why have any sort of authentic relationship with the world around you when you could waste all your time trying to figure out the perfect category to put everything in? Why bother to react to reality when you could be busy categorizing things into groups that might as well be “things I don’t have to think about but like” and “things I don’t have to think about but don’t like”?

The character of the priest and their court is the character of the house. As I begin to create a new society, I find myself thinking about the character of my society and my own character.

So far, all my ‘babies’—the people who will be my spiritual children—are rough. Life has not been kind to them. In fact, in many cases, life has taken an endless dump on their heads. They’ve been homeless. They’ve been abused. They were never supposed to succeed. They were never supposed to do well. They are awkward, or hard cases, or alienated.

I am not their beacon of purity, here to remind them of their separation from the divine and their own inherent unworthiness. I am here to crack jokes so dark that they end up laughing, no matter what happens to them. That is my character and the character of my society.

Let me tell you a secret about laughter. When you can laugh no matter what happens to you, you are touching the divine.

This is something no purity, no pure person, no exercise in categories can give you: an authentic experience of divinity, in all its nonsensical, antithetical glory.

We might be knee deep in the shit, but we are holding hands with god.