Good morning, digital neighbors! Happy Monday, ADD Irregulars, Coffee Talkers, and WSN Curators. Hey there, Phamily, all you Misfits and Politically Homeless, and finally, all our Friends & Refugees, Early Birds & Late Dayers, Conversants & Lurkers at the Rubin Report. How about a few quotes and thoughts about humor and laughter this week? After faith, few things matter more to me than a good sense of humor, shared laughter, and a willingness not to become totally bogged down in the drama of culture and society. Be aware, but don’t be held hostage by the spirit of the day.
Burt Bacharach wrote that what the world needs now is love, sweet love, and he wasn’t entirely wrong. But these days, what the world needs now is a sense of humor. It used to be the Uptight Right, the Religious Stiffs, and Moral Prudes that had no sense of humor. Move aside, Moral Majority, and make room for the mentally ill, the emotionally mired, and indoctrinated minds of every bad relational frame spawned from our broken colleges and universities of higher contamination. As Thomas Sowell is fond of saying, “Some ideas are so bad only an intellectual could believe them.” I think he is paraphrasing George Orwell. Either way, it is amazing that in my lifetime the Right was passed on the inside lane by the Left and its moralizing wokeism which has contaminated so much of our culture in the West.
We were chatting at Coffee Talk the other day that people don’t have a right not to be offended. Someone, somewhere is going to disagree with you. GASP! Say it isn’t so! They may have a different or opposing opinion. Worse yet, if they have a sense of humor, they may direct laughter at your most treasured ideas and poke fun at things you take so seriously you can’t joke about them. Sure, humor can be mean-spirited and demeaning, but I think that has to be illustrated; just having hurt feelings is not enough to say it is mean-spirited. You can’t go through life always waiting to be offended and ever arrive at the shores of contentment.
No amount of medicine or therapy can fix a broken attitude and a wounded perspective. You must want to change; many do not. I don’t understand why so few seem to ever ask if the way they are seeing things, their expectations about relationships, or interpretations of the world might be the problem. The one thing you can actually try to change is yourself, your attitude, your expectations, and what you choose to focus on in life. Laughter and humor can help defuse the temptation to make too much of ourselves and our self-importance. A few quotes about laughter and humor, and off to your Monday, dear neighbors!
"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." — Nicolas Chamfort
"If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane." — Robert Frost
"There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor." — Charles Dickens
Lake Blanche Trail- Salt Lake City, Wendi Wells - Unsplash
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the “Sun King” (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaire’s main love was writing—an endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
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XIII
The Proud Minister
One day there came into the Garden a man in torn clothes badly bruised and cut, who said to the Lover, “In the name of the Beloved I demand your help.”
So the Lover and the Disciple let him in and dressed his wounds and prepared the best of the vegetables from the Garden for him to eat. When his wounds had been dressed and he had eaten and rested the Lover asked him how he had fallen into this plight, to which the man replied, “I was Minister of the Beloved in a city near this place, where I preached His gospel and expounded His doctrine to the people. I pointed out to them how their sins had made them wholly hateful to the Beloved and how therefore they were utterly beyond the range of His love and He would condemn them to eternal torments, whereon some fell into despair and wept bitterly but many were angry. One day the magistrates called me before them and begged me to leave the city and preach elsewhere for they said I had made many people so angry and desperate that they feared there might be a riot and they might not be able to protect me but that I might suffer some injury. I, however, very zealous for the Beloved and believing that the magistrates only feared that their own sins might be proclaimed, preached the more vehemently, denounced the magistrates and made it abundantly clear that the whole wicked city was foredoomed to eternal punishment by the just provision of the Beloved. Whereon a mob, stirred up no doubt by the corrupt and venal magistrates, fell upon me with sticks and stones, nearly killing me and driving me out of the city in the state in which I came to you.”
“My friend,” said the Lover, “this was not a good deed of yours, for besides denying the unfathomable compassion of the Beloved, you have by your obstinacy caused these people to commit a grievous sin, and this cannot be pleasing to the Beloved, that through you who profess to be His minister the people should become worse. Surely you remember that He Himself said, ‘If they persecute you in one city flee to another.’”
Therefore the man was very angry, and cursing the Lover, said, “I see that I have had a very false report of you and I do not believe that you are a servant of the Beloved at all. When I came to you so injured for the Beloved’s sake you set before me only herbs and fruits although the garden is full of birds which you could have killed to make me a worthy meal. I shall proclaim everywhere that you are no true servant of the Beloved but a mere falterer who dares not suffer in the cause of the Beloved. Be sure that you are foreordained to eternal torments who suffer nothing here.”
For the man was so blinded by his own pride that he could not perceive the scars on the hands and feet and the brows of the Lover nor how the cloth beneath the armpits of his tunic was dyed with a red dye. So he went out of the Garden cursing and shouting.
But the Lover looked sad and said, “A man like this does much harm to the cause of the Beloved, for by thus speaking falsely about the Beloved he may bring men to fear Him but none to love Him, and by love alone can any man approach the Beloved.”
