In imitation of the cry of dereliction from the Cross, Buechner writes that this desire to heal from loneliness is a prayer that asks,
My God, where the Hell are you, meaning If thou art our Father who art in Heaven, be thou also our Father who art in Hell because Hell is where the action is, where I am and the cross is. It is where the pitiless storm is. It is where men labor and are heavy laden under the burden of their own lives without you.
Crying to God to join suffering man in the depths of Hell reveals a desire for intimacy with the God who already entered into this state and showed us that even the most sinful person is not so isolated that he or she can’t meet God in those depths. To confront the seeming isolation of our darkest curvature inwards is to find God already waiting for us there.
This fact that there is neither height nor depth that can separate even the tragically alone from the love of God introduces the possibility that our isolation in sin can be overcome in the twinkling of an eye when the promise of God becomes real in time and eternity. The first of Buechner’s cross-references for laughter mentions the story of faith contained in Sarah’s laughter at the promise of a child in her old age, a promise so startling that it takes Sarah’s breath away. Buechner reminds us,
Faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,’ says the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called laughter. If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked him if it hurt, he might have answered, like the old man in the joke, ‘Only when I laugh.’ But he wouldn’t have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing.
Tucked between the doctrinal claim that faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the possibility of Jesus Himself laughing through His assurance in the eventual defeat of His Passion’s suffering, Sarah’s laughter receives the child with a joke of a name that showed how little she believed that God would live up to His promise to her husband. When Buechner returns to the image of Sarah and Abraham’s laughter at God’s pledge, he notes that the laughter comes from their self-awareness that only a fool would believe this promise, yet they are these fools, and ‘[t]hey are laughing because laughing is better than crying and maybe not even all that different.’ Again, Buechner shows the interconnection between those dry and empty years when Sarah and Abraham are caught up in the aching loneliness of a childless marriage that longs for more and the sudden possibility that the very desires of their hearts would be fulfilled long past the point of reasonable likelihood.