I Take My Silly Seriously

Today is INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY. I will be taking what opportunities I can all day to talk like a pirate. I love stuff like this. It is silly, and that makes it very serious business for me. A life without silliness is hardly any kind of life at all. We need the silly, for various reasons. The silly is an escape from the humdrum of every day life. It breaks us out of our patterns that make us so comfortable. People are often made UNcomfortable by silly behavior. That discomfort is very important indeed. Discomfort is sometimes how we should feel. The in-breaking of the new, of the unusual, can truly be a divine experience.

The silly, like the humorous (of which it is properly a species), helps us bracket off the normal way we valuate the world. The silly transvaluates. When we are being silly, that silliness is taken, paradoxically, with the utmost import. I cannot understand HOW someone cannot see how awesome INTERNATIONAL TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY is. Everything we normally think of as 'important' and 'serious' is suddenly bracketed off. The momentarily ridiculous is made the supreme value. What is interesting is how we directly experience this kind of paradox or tension. There is something transcendent in the encounter with the silly. Silliness is one of the ways we touch the face of the God that Jesus Christ incarnates. For  the idea that God was incarnated in this man is the silliest idea of all. God turns the way we value the world upside down. God doesn't stick out, doesn't overpower, and yet remains fully God, the foundation of all that is. The topsy-turvy world of the silly is the very presence of God in the world.

To experience this yourself, just visit your local comic book store on the day some big movie comes out. The conversations about the costume, or the turns in the story, are from the point of view of 'the world' the silliest kinds of conversation. Yet in the context of those people at that time, the conversation is of utmost import. Indeed shouting matches have taken place over whether Batman is better than Superman, even while wars are waged on the other side of the world. Even in the center of a war zone, no doubt people have found the time to argue over the silliest of matters.

This transvaluation, in a sense, also reveals the silliness of our everyday lives. It shows that what we normally take to be important, isn't really that important in the grand scheme of things. If matters of economics and politics were worth the passions they normally raise, then how is it possible that those passions are sublimated so quickly by so-called 'sillier concerns'. Might it be that the silly, which we take seriously only for moments, might in reality be the more important or at least reveals something more important? Could it be that it is everyday life that constitutes the 'play acting' and the nod to the silliness constitutes 'real life'?

Yet as I said before, without a little bit of silliness, life is hardly life at all. Silliness not only breaks us out of our patterns, and turns the world upside down, but it relieves us of the world's pains. Silliness can bracket off not only the seriousness of the world, but the pain of our own lives. Children in cancer wards have been cheered up by silly clowns, and I've been able to find escape in fantasy, even in the midst of great hardship. Could it be in the end that it is those moments that reveal life as it really is? Perhaps, in the end, it is the serious that is silly, and the silly that is serious.