Right on, Spencer. Sometimes I wonder if The Lord is delaying his hour of return just from the sheer delight of watching His petulant children. I too never want my kids to grow up. It’s funny.
I one time broke down in tears in front of my family as I was reading out loud the closing pages (of the last chapter) of GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy. He describes the hilarity of heaven, and the hidden mirth of Jesus. Thank you Spencer for a beautiful reflection on joy and laughter.
Oh my goodness!!! I was just thinking of the same passage reading this!!!
"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian...The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall...Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness...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 it was His mirth.
Thus once again showing (in my own humble view) that Dickens himself wrote A Christmas Carol with a bit of Divine inspiration. The man himself, like all of us, was flawed--but that "little novella" is the essence of joy, at least to me.
I’m totally up for a heaven full of Roadrunner and Coyote, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Tweety and Sylvester, and Bugs Bunny and crew. Seriously (though not to exclude the cartoons, Groucho Marx, the Rat Pack, and Johnny Carson re-runs), aren’t the life-after-death stories full of feelings of unrestrained joy and ecstasy? That’s got to include plenty of laughter. I mean God created us (and aardvarks, platypuses, and ostriches). He *has* to have great sense of humor.
Mentioned once before, not long after you started TNJ, that all you have to do is look at hair. When you’re a young man, you have a healthy crop of hair on your head, some whiskers, if you choose, and then disaster starts to happen, mild though it may be. You start growing hair where you never expected it and, worse, losing it where you wanted to keep it. It takes a real sense of humor to create that kind of comedy. Or maybe that’s tragedy.
Perhaps it's like the laughter you get from the infectious giggling of babies and children when they bubble over with happiness as they marvel at the newness and novelty of the world in their eyes.
Well said. I love the clip from "A Christmas Carol." That scene is particularly wonderful in the Patrick Stewart version. He laughs with such abandon that you can't help but feel his joy. That joy is "other worldly," meaning it is "heavenly."
I think the explanation for 'How was there laughter in Heaven before.....?' is the use of the word 'before'. There is no before and after for God. He is outside time and always knew us and our humorous foibles.
I just found it! - https://pjmedia.com//andrew-klavan/2015/01/11/our-god-laughs-our-holy-war-with-radical-islam-n180141
Right on, Spencer. Sometimes I wonder if The Lord is delaying his hour of return just from the sheer delight of watching His petulant children. I too never want my kids to grow up. It’s funny.
I one time broke down in tears in front of my family as I was reading out loud the closing pages (of the last chapter) of GK Chesterton's Orthodoxy. He describes the hilarity of heaven, and the hidden mirth of Jesus. Thank you Spencer for a beautiful reflection on joy and laughter.
Oh my goodness!!! I was just thinking of the same passage reading this!!!
"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian...The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall...Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness...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 it was His mirth.
Thus once again showing (in my own humble view) that Dickens himself wrote A Christmas Carol with a bit of Divine inspiration. The man himself, like all of us, was flawed--but that "little novella" is the essence of joy, at least to me.
I’m totally up for a heaven full of Roadrunner and Coyote, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Tweety and Sylvester, and Bugs Bunny and crew. Seriously (though not to exclude the cartoons, Groucho Marx, the Rat Pack, and Johnny Carson re-runs), aren’t the life-after-death stories full of feelings of unrestrained joy and ecstasy? That’s got to include plenty of laughter. I mean God created us (and aardvarks, platypuses, and ostriches). He *has* to have great sense of humor.
I personally know God has a sense of humor. I
Mentioned once before, not long after you started TNJ, that all you have to do is look at hair. When you’re a young man, you have a healthy crop of hair on your head, some whiskers, if you choose, and then disaster starts to happen, mild though it may be. You start growing hair where you never expected it and, worse, losing it where you wanted to keep it. It takes a real sense of humor to create that kind of comedy. Or maybe that’s tragedy.
Methinks it’s all about perspective.
Perhaps it's like the laughter you get from the infectious giggling of babies and children when they bubble over with happiness as they marvel at the newness and novelty of the world in their eyes.
Well said. I love the clip from "A Christmas Carol." That scene is particularly wonderful in the Patrick Stewart version. He laughs with such abandon that you can't help but feel his joy. That joy is "other worldly," meaning it is "heavenly."
I think the explanation for 'How was there laughter in Heaven before.....?' is the use of the word 'before'. There is no before and after for God. He is outside time and always knew us and our humorous foibles.
Scrooge's "I just can't help it!" line gets me every time.
Lovely!!