Outstanding Chesterton quote – thanks for that.

The lightness of being is part of the human condition, an irrepressible and healthy part of who we are. We invite God into that sector of our souls, as with all things. We are not mocking the greatness of the divine, we are humbly asking Him to condescend to our condition so that we may be divinely inspired and informed in all things through Him.

At the same time, of course humor can be dangerous — particularly the biting, ironic variety with which we are accustomed in postmodernity. The pastor was communicating his ineffable joy best his meager poetry and “redneck” patois could. Considering the unavoidable, jaw-dropping irreverence we are used to enduring in the culture at large, considering its ubiquity and its constant urge to outdo itself; calling the pastor’s prayer “irreverent” in such a context is wildly incongruous relative to the age. The man obviously, ecstatically loves the Lord. Condemnation for irreverence should include at a minimum some hint of the Christ-hating malice that has poisoned every cultural precinct of the era without any means to escape it. God bless Pastor Nelms.

We “reverent” are used to deploying a single tone when addressing God, and, while that may assist us from overstepping our station, it is not adequate to His comprehensive dominion. Shall the preacher make no instructive jokes from the pulpit? Is all laughter blasphemous from the pews? I shudder to imagine. We learn best, we are at our most relaxed and free when we are filled with mirth, the very Spirit of the Lord. “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Chesterton concludes Orthodoxy this way:

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.

You know what would need in here? A good orthodox Jew to inject this staid Puritanical panel of judgment with some rabbinical humor. They have outclassed us younger brothers in this regard for centuries.

This is the kind of throwaway line that has great meaning and it has stuck with me ever since.

Are not these things be part of the mysterious ways?

And thanking God for his “smoking hot wife” isn’t a way of honoring his wife – it’s more in the category of lewd bragging in a high school locker room. It’s about him, not her.

“It’s interesting that there are no humorous public prayers in Scripture.”

I’ll have to think that one over. There are almost certainly examples of ironic humor in Scripture – but perhaps not in a specific formal prayer that I can recall.

But I myself know that some of my exchanges with God – my ‘turning my attention to the Other’ – my prayer – *are* humorous indeed. I wonder if that’s part of the root of the distaste some feel: that this was in some ways extraordinarily authentic and dare I say ‘more acceptable’ as the words of a private prayer – but perhaps not one we wanted to hear publicly expressed.