We had a lot of fun on the last night of our pilgrimage. Over the previous week, different parts of the Fionnphort community hall, a modest wooden building about a mile from the ferry terminal which takes you to Iona, had served a wonderful variety of purposes: dining-room, lecture theatre, dormitory and chapel. In the end, it became what we imagine all village halls should be: a place of exuberant, makeshift entertainment, without benefit of electronics. After enjoying a final meal together, pilgrims of all ages and nationalities were invited to show off any talents they had, and the results were quite impressive. There were limericks, comic ditties and nursery rhymes from America and Greece. A Russian pilgrim taught us her own version of charades. Spanish serenades were sung. Balkan folk-songs were crooned in various Slavic tongues, with an upturned teapot for percussion. A French love-poem was recited with a pleasant hint of a Dutch accent; and there was a more serious piano recital, performed by French hands, in the universal language of blazing musical talent.
Above all there were jokes: the sort of humour that flowed naturally between a group of people, from places like California, Colchester, Madrid and Marseilles, who for the past week had been scrambling over the wet Iona grass, bathing in icy waters with seals for company, or sailing through sunshine and squalls to tiny green patches of land like Inchkenneth. And in between remembering the monastic witness, and earthly achievements, of Saint Columba, pilgrims had enjoyed some wonderful treats – like the frescoes from another monastic realm, medieval Trebizond, which were shown to us by a Mull-based Byzantinologist, David Winfeld: he and his wife drove two hours to present a display of his restoration work, accomplished nearly 50 years ago. And we had heard, from Jim Forest, some stories from the lives of ordinary people in modern America who managed to confront evil with good and turn enemies into friends. Add to all those happy memories the sheer, giddy relief which the pilgrimage’s main organisers were entitled to feel after coping brilliantly with some practical challenges.
The heroes of 2005 were Hugh and Imogen Maxfield and their three-month-old son Edmund, assisted by Hugh’s mother Catherine and Imogen’s parents Martin and Elizabeth Oram: a three-generation team which (in a feat unprecedented in the records of FOI) managed to feed 30 hungry pilgrims three times a day with locally bought food, cooked in the village hall. So there was plenty to laugh about, and we duly chuckled our way through that final evening.
But was it, as a British railway announcer might say, the right kind of laughter? And ought we have to have felt any contradiction, any tension between the exuberant emotions of our parting moments and the deep, uncompomising solemnity of the rite we had experienced the previous day: the elevation of the Holy Cross as an eternal, cosmic symbol of victory over death? We had, I think, celebrated it reasonably well, for a group of (mostly, but not exclusively, Orthodox) people representing many lands and languages.
Of course, we could not have constituted a cathedral choir, any more than we could have earned our livings as stand-up entertainers. But with Bishop Kallistos and Father Athanasios Ledwich as celebrants, and the singing and choir-directing talents of Jordan Banev, Francis Nicholas Garcia and Patsy Fostiropoulos, we were able to mark that glorious moment in the church calendar with at least some of the dignity and feeling it demands – in the stark, 1,000-year-old simplicity of St Oran’s chapel, with even older Celtic crosses rooted to the earth nearby. After all those liturgical gifts, was it proper, was it fitting to be laughing?
The Bible, and the Christian tradition, have plenty to say about mirth in its different varieties. In the Book of Proverbs, the empty-headed giggling of idiots is likened to “the crackling of thorns under a pot”. Elsewhere in the Scriptures, the cruel, mocking kind of laughter is presented as something close to the essence of evil. In the great, prophetic words of Psalm 22, the Son of God is surrounded by enemies who “laugh him to scorn” as they “hurl insults, shaking their heads” and challenge the Lord to deliver the One He supposedly delights in. During Our Lord’s ministry on earth, the very mention of life’s victory over death is enough to bring sniggers from His adversaries: people “laughed at Him” when He assured them that the daughter of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, was not dead but asleep. As Mihail Neamtu, a young Romanian theologian, told us in his presentation on the Cross as a supreme contest between good and evil, the language of derision reaches a crescendo on Golgotha: it isnot Christ’s earthly enemies who lead this chorus but the demonic powers, so densely concentrated that they literally form a dark cloud, like so many insects or locusts.
But their cries of derision are also cries of desperation. From the moment Christ is lifted up on the Cross,His victory begins; his silence and dignity in the face of noisy tormentors steadily reduces them to silence, dispelling the darkness and fear which drive out real love and real laughter. Indeed, so great and so inexpressible is this victory that every form of words, every turn of phrase we use to describe it can fail if we push the metaphor too far: that was the point made by our chairman, Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, in his meticulous analysis of the different images by which our salvation through the Cross has been described. We make speak of Christ paying a “ransom” for the human race, if by that we mean a supreme act of liberation from bondage; but the image breaks down if we insist, pedantically, on knowing to whom the ransom has been paid. There is no meaningful answer to that question.
Likewise, we can and should speak of Christ’s gift as a sacrifice, if by that we mean a freely-made offering, an act of renunciation and love; but that metaphor will also break down if we think of sacrifice as act of fear, appeasing the wrath of a jealous and irascible authority. In the words of the Anglican hymn, “Endless is the victory Thou o’er death hast won”: and in the face of a triumph that is infinite in scope and duration, all human metaphors fail.
If we cannot respond adequately to Christ’s victory in words, how can we react? The Easter hymn sets the mood, at least, for our response: “Shine, shine, O New Jerusalem! For the glory of the Lord has dawned over you! Dance now, and be glad, Zion.” Addressing the Mother of God, and by extension the human race, it goes on: “As for you, all-Holy one, rejoice in the resurrection of your Child.” The disciples who saw Christ’s ascension also knew how to respond: regardless of the persecution that awaited them, they “returned to Jerusalem with great joy” and “stayed continually at the temple, praising God.”
What makes possible this dancing, this delight, is precisely the victory over death, and over the fear of death, that begins with the lifting up of the Cross. A faith that invites us to dance with joy is not one that denies us the right to laugh joyfully; that is not merely a statement about doctrine, it is a fact of Orthodox Christian life. In the early hours of Easter morning, we have all seen the expression on the faces of our priests, hollow-eyed with exhaustion but also exultant, as they shout “Christ is risen” in a medley of languages and playfully swing their censers in every possible direction. At such a moment, the celebrant is not not just performing a ritual, he is laughing for joy.
But in everyday life, can we always tell the difference between joyful laughter and the cruel kind?
As we all know, the line can be quite hard to draw. It is not easy to tell where gentle joshing stops and cruel teasing starts. Despite ourselves, we can find ourselves laughing at humour with a callous or tasteless edge. But I would suggest that our ability to make that distinction – and of course, to discern many other things – is at its sharpest when when we are standing before the Cross, in other words at the intersection between life and death.
We all go through times when - through the death of a loved one, or some physical or medical danger that we ourselves face – that the fact of human mortality is brought home to us. Suddenly our ideas about what matters, and what doesn’t matter become much clearer; and so too do our feelings about what is or was really funny and what wasn’t. Precisely at such moments, we can understand the difference between joyful laughter – the laughter that brings us closer to one another – and the other kind. When the poet Rupert Brooke was anticipating (correctly, as it turned out) his own death in the first world war, he placed “laughter, learnt of friends” on the list of gifts that would remain with him in eternity. And at times when the pain of bereavement is fresh and sharp, one of the few things that can make us smile again is the the remembrance of innocent, funny times that we have shared with our loved ones. Any flash of humour shared by two or more people – in which nobody is trying to embarrass, outdo or put down anybody else – is a moment of vulnerability, intimacy and love: a moment when we glimpse another person’s soul and hence have a glimpse of eternity. No wonder the recollection of such moments can make us smile, even through tears; no wonder the best funeral orations can provoke gales of laughter as well as weeping.
I hope I am speaking for all pilgrims when I say it was the very best kind of humour – “laughter learnt of friends” – that we enjoyed in the final hours of our Scottish sojourn. Indeed, it is through innocent laughter that we become friends – of one another, and of Iona.
26/3/06
This essay is dedicated to the memory of George Potskhveria, whose sudden, premature death was announced earlier today: a popular and highly respected member of the Russian Orthodox community in London, who loved feasting, celebration and innocent fun, but also helped many of his fellow Georgians to stand before the Cross in quieter moments too.
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