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Readings (click here for full text of the readings): The higher Christian churches … come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through the liturgy like [construction workers] along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom. [1] In those eloquent and frightening words, Annie Dillard echoes Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. This is not a concept unique to Christianity, for in pretty much every belief system there’s a sacred role of “the holy fool.”
And in the Christian tradition, we have many fools: St. Paul, who bragged that he and the other apostles were “fools for the sake of Christ”, St. Francis of Assisi and his many crazy habits, and, perhaps, the greatest among them, St. Simeon the Holy Fool, one of the Desert Fathers. After living alone in a cave and eating only lentils for 29 years, he decided to highlight the follies of the world by playing the fool, and ultimately hiding his own saintliness. During church services he threw nuts at the priests and blew out the candles when they weren’t looking. He danced with random people in the streets. And on Good Friday, when everyone else was fasting, he would feast, “consuming,” according to one biography, “vast amounts of beans – with predictable and hilarious results.” Yet, all the while, he was performing miraculous acts on the sly. Granted, these were sort of quirky miraculous acts. On one occasion, he saved a man from debtor’s prison by rolling a double six in a dice game. And another time he punched a man out in order to prevent him from having an affair with a married woman. Now we must be clear – these fools for Christ knew exactly what they were doing. We’re not dealing with the good-hearted obliviousness of Forrest Gump or the Peter Sellers character in Being There. These fools were wiser than anyone else precisely because they saw the world for what it was – artificial, warped, distorted – and they only appeared foolish because they were working on a different set of rules, a heavenly set of rules. Even the dictionary recognizes their role, because one of the definitions of “fool,” nestled in between “one who is deficient in judgment” and “a dessert made of stewed or puréed fruit”, is this: “One who subverts convention … and varies from social conformity in order to reveal spiritual or moral truth.” I admire the holy fools because they’re so different from me. Because if ever I tend toward idolatry, my idol of choice is not money or power, but knowledge. Perhaps on some level I think that I’ve got a chance of “figuring it all out” and so I read and ponder and discuss and debate. And in the end, I spend a lot of time, in the words of a song by the Indigo Girls, Feeding the cancer of my intellect Yet, for all that Holy Week resonates with me. Death coming from life. Triumph from defeat. Glory from ignominy. In the end, what Paul says isn’t just a small part of Christianity – it’s what we’re all about. All we can do is rely on the wisdom of God’s foolishness, and the strength of God’s weakness. And if we are brave enough to see things for how they really are, we’ll see what we do in this place, tonight, and tomorrow night and the night after that, and Sundays throughout the year, not as some eloquent and clever way of putting God into words. Because what it really is is “just certain words which [we’ve] successfully addressed to God without [our] getting killed,” and thanks be to God for that. [1] Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper & Row, 1977): 59. |
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