A friend reminded me that this Kenyan Prayer is much like a line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Mysteries, Yes.”
I like her more explicit praise for the humility of those who laugh and bow their heads — a combination with impossible-to-overstate significance and value.
CS Lewis’s devil Screwtape has a lengthy letter to his nephew Wormwood where he speaks of a group of “thoroughly reliable people; steady, consistent scoffers and worldlings.” It is, perhaps above all, not scoffing per se but laughter that makes them so. Though not just any kind. Of the different causes of human laughter, flippancy is regarded as the most “useful” for a thriving “Lowerarchy.”
Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. … It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.
But when joy accompanies laughter, affection is close at hand. Screwtape warns his nephew that this can be true even in a joke. In sincere joking between affectionate people there is a “pretext” to the joke which shows that the joke itself is not the real cause. “What that real cause is,” says Screwtape, “we do not know.” Even as he describes its connection to joy — that “meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience, quite opaque to us” — he admits that he doesn’t have any idea of its source or its cause.
I’m no Lewis scholar and I don’t even recall if I’ve ever read The Screwtape Letters all the way through. But I think it’s safe to say that the cause, at least as far as we can trace it — and this self-evidently explains its opacity to Screwtape — is praise. Joy can produce the deepest, bust-a-gut laughter imaginable, but it is a joy and a laughter that fundamentally takes the world — and everything and everyone in it — not only seriously but reverently. And even then it knows that it can’t really lay hands on the source.
“The world looks back,” says Christian Wiman, “at the eye that is strong enough (fortified by memory, alert to goodness) and weak enough (made quiet, the ego not eradicated but refined) to see it.”
It starts and ends in reverence and anticipation. We must, as Mary Oliver says, look and laugh with astonishment and bow our heads.