Terry Lindvall is one of those rare people who, along with being very smart, is also very funny – and by funny, I mean laughter-inducing, life-infusing, and joy-producing. Dr. Lindvall is the C.S. Lewis Endowed Chair in Communication and Christian Thought, and Professor of Communication at Virginia Wesleyan College. In addition to being a Lewis scholar (his book Surprised by Laughter: The Comic World of C.S. Lewis should likely be required reading), he has written on a plurality of topics in his twelve books, which include God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert, Divine Film Comedies: Biblical Narratives, Film Sub-Genres and the Comic Spirit, and Old Men of the Bible: Reflections on Faith & Aging. In this interview, you’ll hear firsthand how Terry brilliantly mixes humor and humility with important ideas – a not-always-common combination.
To learn more about Terry Lindvall’s writing, check out his Amazon page.
Radix: Dr. Lindvall, this is such a privilege and an honor to talk with you. Whenever I hear you talk or read what you write, I just love the way you do it; it’s lifegiving, beautiful, and joyous. You mentioned that you are already aware of Radix Magazine. Can you tell us how that happened?
TL: When I was in seminary I came across Radix, The Wittenburg Door, Sojourners, and all those kinds of periodicals. They were really part of our education at Fuller Seminary. We were really trying to engage culture. I think there were two sets of us: there was the Francis Schaeffer set that really attacked culture – I mean, just really tried to presume that they knew everything about it, and deal with the films of Bergman and Fellini, but there wasn’t much engagement there. On the other hand, there were those of us who were starting to read Lewis, and that whole tradition. There is something so charming about culture. You realize, hey, here is a look at human nature – sure, sometimes it’s distorted and sometimes it’s comical – but by studying it, you can get a glimpse into the heart of other people. And so many of us took the Lewis route as opposed to the Schaeffer one, which seemed to be more pompous. It just seemed too pretentious.
You know, this is what I think: if we can talk to the grocery man, the people who fix our cars, and just tell stories – and hear stories from them – we are just going to be able to communicate so much better. And maybe that is a contrast between how Jesus spoke and how Paul wrote. Paul was writing to Christians who were fairly mature in their faith, mostly – except for the Corinthian church where they are just wild. But he’s talking to them in a language that is very sophisticated theologically, about sanctification, redemption, first Adam, second Adam, and all of those things. But Jesus talks about sheep and goats, about grapes, and about virgins.
This reminds me of a favorite sermon I heard while at Fuller Seminary. This prof was talking about the five wise virgins and the five foolish ones. And at the end he said – and he was addressing all the single male seminarians at the time – “Would you rather be with the wise virgins at the feast, or with the foolish virgins in the dark?”
Radix: [Laughter]
TL: It took us a while but we eventually all came to the right answer: we knew where our bodies were headed – to be with the foolish virgins. The point is that Jesus spoke in words and terms and language that we all understand. That’s why I am actually teaching a class right now on parables.
But I have found that most of my students have never even heard of the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. And so these stories become very fresh when you can kind of translate them into a new language; into a language that they are experiencing in their life. So I think it’s essential for all of us to know how to find the stories out there, and speak in that way.
That’s a bit of a digression to the question you asked – but digression is one of my gifts.
Radix: No! Thank you. Sometimes the most fun things can happen on the bunny trails or in the footnotes, so I totally appreciate that.
TL: Yeah, it’s that extemporaneous stuff … because you don’t know quite where you are going, but you just follow where the trail goes.
I am teaching a class right now on communication. And it seems that in the classroom, laughter is kind of taboo; it’s anathema to higher education. So what I am trying to show is that laughter really helps in the learning process. Most of the research shows that laughter really enhances our ability to remember. It also decreases stress and does all kinds of good things. And students will allow the professors who are lighthearted and engage them in personal ways to cross the line. And I do! You know, sometimes it’s good to have fun.
Another digression: I recently did a class exercise where I was getting my students to translate various kinds of feelings into their faces – to show them that what we show on our faces will basically translate into who we are. Anyway, there is a whole physiology of laughter. So I told the students, everybody put on a face of fear; then I followed by asking for a face of anger. See, you feel what you are wearing on your face, I said. Then I said, okay, now put on the face of sexual ecstasy.
Radix: [Laughter]
TL: Because no one has seen those faces before, right? Anyway, sometimes it’s good to have fun with people. If you play with people, you can open them up to be able to discuss things they are afraid of otherwise engaging. You just get a freer classroom.
Radix: Thanks for sharing that bit of joy. So can I ask how you came to enjoy appreciating humor so much?
TL: Thank you for that question. You know, I had one Swedish Pentecostal grandmother who was very serious – very, almost dour. You’d go to her house and it was very solemn. Anyway, my brother and I went to my Swedish grandfather and asked for his blessing. He had us on our knees for an hour while he prayed in Swedish, so we had no idea what was going on. So that was the one side of the family. Quite serious. On my mom’s side though was a different thing entirely. My grandfather was a coal miner, and my grandmother was one of the most joyous, rollicking people I’d ever met. She was short as anything, but she had this joie de vivre in whatever she did. A person just couldn’t be around her without laughing. Being in and with that family was a festival and a carnival. And then, throughout my own growing up, too. My family was made up of four kids: a twin sister, a younger sister, and a younger brother. And it was such an environment of love and affection and freedom that we were able to do everything.
Also, my dad was an Army chaplain, and he would bring home for dinner a variety of different religious people pretty regularly. So I would hear these Episcopal and Catholic priests and Episcopal bishops who often brought a lot of wine, and then sit around the table and just go off telling stories. The laughter at that dinner table, I think, was one of my favorite memories. So that influenced my appreciation of laughter.
Radix: And, obviously, you still enjoy it now.
TL: You know, I went to this smaller Assembly of God college, Vanguard University in Southern California. I think there were 600 students there, and the faculty was just amazing. And I was known for pranks. Anyway, there was just a lot of laughter and joy in that community. I think it was much more like a Chaucer pilgrimage than a John Bunyan pilgrimage. Bunyan walked by himself, all solitary for the most part. I mean, he had some good people come and be with him for a while, such as Evangelist or Hope, but generally it was a whole lot of negative people. But with Chaucer? You walk with everybody and you stay with them; that kind of community is so crucial to having a climate of laughter.
Radix: That’s so interesting about Chaucer, and I have heard that analogy between Bunyan and Chaucer before. It seems to me, coming from more pietistic roots – and God bless our roots – that, yes, Jesus does want to be our friend. But he doesn’t want to be our only friend! So Chaucer’s point seems to indicate something that can be missing within Christianity. Can you speak more to that?
TL: Yeah, I think community is essential because we bring out in each other aspects that nobody else can. And that is where true friendship comes in. You know, Jesus called twelve disciples, and he could have just as easily called two or three and kept it really small, but he called this group of twelve, and probably many more as well.
But then you see how they argue with one another, how they try to do the one-upmanship; you see how James’ and John’s mother gets involved and tries to play the Jewish mother and get them better jobs. But later on, you begin to realize that we really need each other, and even if we irritate each other, there is good comedy in there. And so I believe that community brings us together. When you look at the history of the Church, you find out that saints are generally with others, whether that is in the monasteries or in their callings in the world. St. Francis of Assisi is just a wonderful example of how he and his Little Brothers were jesters of God, together. I really like the place in Rossini’s film The Flowers of St. Francis where all his disciples are wanting to know which direction God wants them to go. They are all saying, “tell us where to go.” So, St. Francis tells them to all start spinning in a circle. They do this till they are dizzy and then they fall down, except for this one guy who’s really old and slow, who they just push down. Then, when they are all down on the ground with spinning heads, St. Francis tells them, “The direction that your head is facing is the direction you are to go in; that’s where God’s will is.” So, the point he is making is that instead of struggling over questioning where God’s will is, he kind of makes a game out of it. In effect, he is saying that the Holy Spirit is in all parts of our lives; that even when we play and when we are together, God has given us the freedom to move in different ways. But we are also supposed to learn from each other about how to play together. That’s important as well.
This reminds me of another of my favorite and enjoyable saints, St. Philip Neri who lived in the 16th century. Basically, he was kind of known for carrying around a Bible and book of jokes wherever he went. And he considered a cheerful temperament to be more Christian than a melancholic one. He carried that attitude his whole life. He said that God never wanted us to look dismal, but that God wanted us to have joyful hearts. He was also known for his pranks. So he would show up at important events with half of his beard shaved off, or he’d give his disciples the wrong directions to a place. But what I really liked was what he said when asked for advice by these dandies who would come to him for penance: he’d tell them to wear ridiculous hats, or do folk dances and act as if they were drunk.
There was this one especially pompous academic who was scheduled to undergo an examination in front of the pope. So what Philip Neri told him to do was to “go in there, and the first thing you say is that ‘I am far too learned to take this exam.’” And so the guy, because he was under orders, had to obey St. Philip Neri, his bishop. The point is that St. Neri thought that humility and humor are very connected to each other. Another story about him is this: whenever people came to visit him in his cell he wanted to make sure he was reading comic literature because he didn’t want them to catch him at prayer. He just liked to lighten things up.
He’s the one who first gave us that great story about the woman who slandered her neighbor and asked him for advice. He instructed her to go and get a chicken, pluck the chicken, and then spread the feathers into the wind from the top of a tower. So, after following those instructions, she asked what to do afterward. “Collect all the feathers,” St. Neri told her. The lesson, of course, was to teach her about the power of slander. He always wanted to bring people down from their pride. I mean, self-righteousness is the worst sin, right? It’s the one sin that God gets really angry at. And we do see God mocking pride and using very dark satire in Scripture when people try to be more righteous than others. Philip Neri was like that as well.
Radix: I am totally going to look him up.
TL: On his door he put a sign that read, “The House of Christian Mirth.” So, yeah, he really thought mirth was the way to go.
Radix: I find it just fascinating that God digs humor so much. In what ways do humor and humility connect? And I would think that you very much assume a connection.
TL: Humility and humor all come from these two Latin words: humere and humus. And these kind of take us back to the basic elements of our life. When God created us, he created what C.S. Lewis called that spiritual oxymoron, that we are of the earth, we’re flesh and of the dirt, but into that he breathes his spirit. So we are spiritual and we are animals, on the one side related to the angels, to the transcendent, and to the Amish; on the other we are related to the earth, and to skunks and toads and lawyers. So we have these two things that bring us together. It’s just a wonderful incongruity. You mentioned in one of your questions about being fitted together. We are fitted together with two parts: flesh and spirit. This is why evolution is not problematic because we are akin to the owl and the jackal, as Job says. They are our cousins. And so we are connected to this kind of animal kingdom that has evolved. But then we also have the breath of God, and that gives us a kinship to him. So, both those aspects come together wonderfully in humanity.
Radix: In your book Surprised by Laughter you have this line that is pretty close to the beginning:
“When we read religious writing (or, what is often worse, writing by a religious person), the last thing we expect to discover is laughter. We expect the religious writer to handle truth, ethics, and other serious concerns with appropriate decorum. Treating issues of ultimate reality with levity is the habit of the fool, the mocker, the jester, the idiot.”
Obviously you disagree with this, and I assume, over the years, you haven’t likely changed your mind!
TL: No, not at all. I think when you look at Christians like the 3rd century St. Genesius, who is kind of the patron saint of comedy, you can see this. Or you look at St. Lawrence, who when asked by emperor Valerian to bring to him the treasures of the Church (because Valerian thought the church had so much money), St. Lawrence brings the poor, the cripples, and the outcast, and says, “here are the treasures of the Church.” And later, when St. Lawrence was being martyred over a grill, he has a great line where he says, “you’d better turn me over, I think I’m done on this side.” And then there is St. Simeon, a Russian saint and a kind of holy fool who, to embarrass the wealthy churches, went and found a dead dog in the trash heap. He tied a rope to the dead dog and walked with it throughout the cathedral. Basically, it was a parable to show the people that their wealth not only isn’t something they can use, but it also stinks. And then you have others like G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc and Ronald Knox, these comic characters that, along with being Christian, use their humor to speak to the world.
On the other hand, you have these comics like Voltaire or Nietzsche, and they have a kind of contemptuous levity in the way they speak. Voltaire has this line that says that religion first started when the first scoundrel met the first fool. And there is something true about that, if you’re going to invent religion. But when Christ becomes man, it is Christ taking on our failing; Christ becoming one of us.
But I like Nietzsche because he recognized a few more things than we realize. He saw the Victorian God as being one of respectability, but he wasn’t a God who laughed. And so he said to Christians, “look at you Christians, kind of like those little bugs that, in their insatiable desire to smell of the infinite, make the infinite smell of bugs. You made God into a human being because you want to be like gods. And so I am going to call every truth false that is not accompanied by one laugh.” So – and this is significant – Nietzsche is looking for a God that laughed. Of course, the problem was that during his time, there were very few Christians who could show him the laughter of God. It’s too bad that Chesterton was born after Nietzsche because I think that Chesterton might have changed Nietzsche’s life.
Radix: Where do you think that this idea that spirituality is supposed to be dour came in?
TL: To give you a little background, I taught at Regent University for twenty-five years, and then a “Haman” came along and accused me of several things that were all slanderous. So I got fired after twenty-five years of working there. Two years later, the slanderer got fired for even worse things than he accused me of. Anyway, after twenty-five years of working, I asked myself, what am I going to do? I am still kind of in the prime of my life. It turned out very well though, and the Lord supplied for my wife and me. I went down and taught at Duke University for a year. Then I taught at The College of William and Mary. And then a position opened up about eight miles from our house at Virginia Wesleyan University.
What was so great about being fired was that I was taken into two different departments: Communications, which was my area of study, as well as Religious Studies. So I was halftime at both, and I was also called to teach Church History. Conveniently, I had taken Church History at Fuller with Geoffrey Bromiley twenty or thirty years previous. And so, as I was teaching, I began reading from and about all the kinds of people I mentioned above, and found out how important humor is.
It all started in the 4th century with Evagrius, a communal monk down in North Africa who created the categories of the eight deadly sins, which also have their corresponding eight virtues. But one of his own sins was basically melancholia or sadness – a kind of sloth – where you don’t care and you are sad. So, sadness for him was a vice. The corresponding virtue was hilaritas, which is hilarity, to laugh, and to enjoy God. So even in the second and third centuries, the early Church still had an appreciation of that. What I found though was that when St. Benedict comes along, while he took most of his ideas from Evagrius, he institutes all these rules, kind of a ladder of rules. Numbers eleven and twelve made me realize that I could never be a Benedictine because they say that he who creates levity shall be lashed and kicked out of the monastery because levity and laughter are not fitting for a man of God. And so it’s these Benedictine monks who are spending too much time together and not realizing that they have the freedom to laugh in the presence of God – and that began to constrain laughter. And then when Constantine took over the Church, and the Church became more powerful, we find that it became more corrupt; more like the Romans and the world. Thus, it became arrogant and proud towards everybody else. Add to that the hierarchy that was set up, and there was no longer a community of saints laughing together. Instead, there was the sense that the higher up we are, the more solemn we are to be. So, the Church kind of lost that idea that Chesterton would revive many years later, that the test of a good religion is whether you can joke about it.
Anyway, the Church stopped laughing at itself because the people in charge wanted to prove themselves righteous, and when they looked inside their own hearts, they knew they weren’t. This is why Dante, in The Divine Comedy, is so great because he takes a pope like Boniface VIII and sticks him not in purgatory, but in the Inferno, because he was puffed up about his own position, and just gloried in it. So we need the kind of people who remind us about the importance of laughter and humility; who remind us that Jesus spoke about laughter twice. He said, “woe unto you who laugh now,” referring to the Pharisees directly, because they had power. But then he says, “Blessed are those who are meek and are suffering now, for you are going to laugh.” So there is this kind of promise of laughter. Thus, laughter is something that is good, once you are humble and have repented. So, to pull it all together, the Church lost its appreciation of humor through power and prestige and trying to be more holy and more spiritual than others.
You know, Lewis had this great saying, which pointed out that God gave us our bodies to remind us what hilarious creatures we are: that we are buffoons and that our bodies remind us of that. And even sex helps us remember that hilarious fact.
This reminds me of a favorite joke about Adam and Eve in the Garden before the fall. Adam is walking around naked and he shows Eve his penis. And Eve says, “Hey, where is mine?” So she goes to God, and she’s weeping. She says, “God, you haven’t been fair; you gave him something extra.” So God whispers something to her, and she comes back laughing. Meanwhile, Adam is saying “ha, ha, I have a penis and you don’t.” Eve replies, laughing, “that’s nothing: God told me as long as I have one of these, I can get one of those anytime.”
Radix: [Laughter]
TL: So there is this kind of humor in sex that we can find. We just find that our bodies are hilarious. As we get older our bodies sag and leak and wrinkle, right? We drool, we fart, and everything else. But this is part of the glory of God in saying “look, this is how I’ve created you, and I’m going to renew you. But right now, by your own efforts, you are going to be a clown and jester, and enjoy it.” And that allows us to remain humble when we look at ourselves in the mirror.
Radix: That is fantastic. Do you ever get in trouble for pushing the limits too far?
TL: Oh, I’m married – of course I do.
Radix: [Laughter]
TL: My wife is my conscience, my best critic; she’s just wonderful. I have some friends who will say, “Terry, you have gone too far.” But I’d rather go too far than not go anywhere at all. But, yeah, I do have to watch myself. I can go too far, and become more like Voltaire, particularly to those in power.
Radix: Could you point to some differences between humor, joy, and laughter?
TL: Laughter is a result of both humor and joy. According to Lewis, there are four kinds of laughter: it can be the fruit of joy, fun, the joke proper, and satire and flippancy. I would say that humor is more in the realm of fun and play. It’s kind of a good character quality when you are able to be self-effacing and enjoy others – maybe even poking them in the ribs. But with wit, you start poking them in the eyes. Anyway, all these can elicit laughter.
But I think one of the most underused sources of laughter is actually joy. For Lewis, when we see friends that we haven’t seen for a long time, we just laugh. There is joy. You know, when we are with friends and we are eating and drinking together, and no one is telling jokes, we still laugh. So, the jokes aren’t needed for laughter. In fact, jokes only make up about 10 percent of all laughter, which makes them quite secondary. It’s really the presence of others, and being with others, and being in communion with them that is the big thing.
In fun and play, you release yourself and let your body be what it is. There are all kinds of laughing exercises that can put a person in an actual state of fun. I do this with my classes sometimes. And of course, the laughter is contagious. It’s also very healthy: it releases endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin. It’s just good.
One of my favorite stories from Chesterton is where he talks about children enjoying things in monotony: they want the same things done again and again, whether that’s being told a story or being thrown in the air – and they say, “do it again.” Chesterton says that God is like this too. Every morning he sees the sun rise or the moon set, and he claps his hands in glee and says, “do it again.” And so, in that kind of play and activity, we find all the joy in our life. God gave us so much joy in just eating and drinking and playing with each other. And we can miss out on it if we aren’t careful.
I think one of my next projects will be to look at where children lose their humor. You know, children laugh about two or three hundred times a day, while adults laugh around ten to fifteen times. I think that laughter gets lost in middle school. So I have already started research with some friends on why that happens. One thing I have discovered is that for the first two years of elementary school, a teacher likes the class clown. But by the third or fourth grade, they start having more serious things to teach, and they want the students to learn. That means the class clown becomes a disruption to the teacher and the other students. So the students and the teacher begin to treat the class clown differently, leaving that person as a kind of outsider. But this decline of laughter follows into college, where people are afraid to laugh. And I think we have got to overcome that.
Churches, fortunately, have begun to change. I mean, there are more churches now that are more accepting of humor, and that is very healthy. Though it can also be artificial. But I do wish that pastors would tell more children’s stories, because that is when they get down to speak in a language that everybody can relate to.
Radix: What an interesting project, especially considering how much good can come from laughter.
TL: One of my favorite lines from William James is, “we don’t laugh because we are happy; we are happy because we laugh.” I think that so often the laughter itself creates the emotion. And while it might not be as good as redemption, it is absolutely a gift of God that brings about healing and other good things.
Radix: I love that you are so joy-filled. If I might ask, because of your tendency to create laughter, do you think you have ever lost respect in academic circles?
TL: I hope so!
Radix: [Laughter]
TL: I am sure I have. But, you know, a comic doesn’t go for respect. They go for the laugh and the relationship. They are trying to connect with people and create some moment of identification. Also, speaking of respect, there is no verse that says to respect God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. It’s love. And love is more attached to laughter than it is to respect. I think, too, that more people in the academy are probably insecure, so their periodicals, books, and everything else has to be respectful. They have to look solemn and that’s a danger.
I have had some great editors from various presses, but in one of my first books, I was told that I had to take all the jokes out. They told me I was being too flippant and too silly. So if you notice, what I did was to put all the jokes – including the naughty ones – in the endnotes. So I can say that I still got to have my jokes in the book.
Radix: [Laughter] Well, I hope that things have changed a little bit? Because the books that are the easiest to remember are often the ones that have the most emotional engagement.
TL: One thing I have done to remedy that is that I take turns going back and forth from writing academic to more popular books. Just recently a friend, Craig Wansink, who is a Presbyterian minister as well as a colleague of mine, wrote a book with me titled Old Men of the Bible. It’s kind of a comic look at what happens when we get old. Our original title was Old Men of the Bible: We’re Not Getting Any Better, We’re Just Getting Older.
Radix: [Laughter]
TL: Usually, you think that as you become an older saint all your sins are going to go away. It doesn’t happen though. Anyway, in the book we looked at many of the ends of the lives of all these kinds of patriarchs in the Bible. What we find is that by the end of their lives, many patriarchs were actually worse than they were earlier in life! They are angrier, more resentful, lustful, and drunk. I mean, just everything goes wrong at the end of their lives.
A really good lesson on the importance of grace came to me a while back in the form of a sermon given by David Allen Hubbard, a previous president of Fuller. He pointed out that when we look at the book of Ephesians, there are three times when it tells of grace and peace being given to us: at the beginning, the middle, and the end. So we can see grace is given to us at the beginning, middle, and end – it’s grace throughout our entire life. And this is an important point because sometimes we know we have started with grace, and we are getting grace to go through, but then after a while we can think, okay, now I’m going to sanctify myself. But that’s not the point. The point is that even at the end of our lives, when we haven’t gotten rid of certain sins, grace is there – and it is grace and mercy that comes to us abundantly. And that should make us happy.
I had a favorite moment happen to me when I was taking the Eucharist from a friend, Walter Hoffman, at a very orthodox Episcopal church. I had eaten the Body, and was being handed the Cup. But before he handed it to me, Walter took a step back and looked at me with a gleam in his eye and said, “sinner.”
Radix: [Laughter]
TL: And I said, “well, that’s why I am here.” But, you know, this is the whole point, right? So then he gave me a big gulp from the Cup, and it was really good. It reminded me of a Dorothy Sayers character who, after she receives the Eucharist, offends everybody as she leaves the Eucharist table laughing hilariously because her sins have been forgiven. And I think that this is something we have lost. Yes, of course, it’s a serious meal, but it’s not a solemn one. The opposite of serious is trivial, and the opposite of comic is tragic. And this is a serious and comic moment, taking the Body and Blood of Christ.
Radix: Thank you for sharing that image of going away from Communion laughing. We are supposed to be happy about it.
TL: Oh, we are. We are all sinners, yet we are all part of the Body of Christ, too. And it’s so wonderful.
Another book that I really enjoyed writing – the best I have written, and the only other book of mine that my wife has read – is called The Mother of All Laughter: Sarah and the Genesis of Comedy. I took five verses from the book of Genesis and did a midrash, a kind of textual commentary, on each verse. And it was a really fun book to do.
And then I wrote a book with my daughter. It started out from seeing an artist, Deborah Camp, who was doodling at a C.S. Lewis retreat. I asked her if she’d want to do a children’s book, but she said she didn’t have a story. So I went to my daughter, who was eleven, and I said, “Caroline, what are you afraid of losing? She said, “my laugh.” And so we wrote a little book called The Girl Who Couldn’t Laugh. It’s about a girl who grows up too fast and becomes sophisticated because her aunt tells her to be mature and not laugh. And so by acting mature, and getting involved in all these important things, she doesn’t laugh. Her brother and mother try to make her laugh, but she doesn’t laugh. Only at the end, when her father brings in a mirror, does she laugh again. So it’s kind of a wonderful father-daughter experience that we had in creating that book together.
Radix: That’s really neat how you write both the academic stuff and the non-academic. I think it’s important to be able to do both because then your ideas are going to reach more people. Actually, do you have any tips for people who want to write? Obviously to read more, but is there anything else?
TL: I would say to write letters. I have been writing to a woman in her eighties who lives up in Connecticut once or twice a month for the last twenty-five years. There is just something about forcing yourself to sit down and write what’s going on in your life to someone. So, to create that correspondence is very important.
The second thing I’d say is to just start writing your book. Now. Write the outline and write the book. Now, it’s going to be so bad, but it’s going to be a beginning. I believe everybody has several books inside them. But yeah, just start writing.
The third thing, which you mentioned and it’s underused, is to do more reading. Find people you really enjoy, and then read everything of theirs. Then imitate them. Imitation is one of the best ways to learn to write. This will help you develop a style. Right now, Dave Barry is one of my favorite writers. The way he deals with men and women and their relationships is so enjoyable. And so by reading Barry, you’d get that tone, that rhythm, that kind of humor, and you’d adapt it. Because when you take something in, it then comes out of you.
C.S. Lewis said that everybody should have an auctour, which means an author you imitate. He had that. He attributed everything he wrote to people like Chesterton, George MacDonald, and Elizabeth Nesbitt, and others. Like, he copied from them. Anyway, when you imitate people, you can then find your own voice.
Radix: Thank you for sharing those pointers.
TL: Also, a writer’s own writing should entertain themselves as well. Artists need to delight in their work. Just like a cook will enjoy their own food, a writer should enjoy their own writing. And just have fun with it, you know? If you can’t laugh at your material something is wrong. One of my favorite quotes of Chesterton is when he says, “As long as a man is merely witty he can be quite dignified; in other words, as long as he is witty he can be entirely solemn. But if he is mirthful he at once abandons dignity, which is another name for solemnity, which is another name for spiritual pride.”[1] So, essentially, you have to be able to laugh at what you have written. Because the man who doesn’t laugh is not giving himself over to what he has done. And a laugh is like a love affair; it carries a man away. This goes back to something in the Westminster Creed that we often forget: that the chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And one of the things we can enjoy are the gifts of all of his creatures.
Radix: One of my favorite questions to ask, because I believe that pastors still have some influence – not as much anymore, but some – is, if you were able to talk to all the pastors, and they had to listen to you with a smile on their faces, what would you want to tell them?
TL: I think I’d tell them to translate their theology into the vernacular. Just talk like normal people. And enjoy God. Chesterton said that the secret of the Christian life is joy, and joy is contagious. So, if they speak with joy, people are going to want to listen. I’d also tell pastors to recognize their own humanity and the humor that comes along with it.
If pastors can allow themselves to look foolish, they won’t have to worry about respect. The respect comes from rightly handling the Word of God. The respect isn’t for us as people. If God can use Balaam’s ass, he can use a pastor to speak the word of truth. So, part of that is realizing the importance of having some freedom. Are you going to say something funny, or maybe a little quirky, or are you going to be worried about some of the older ladies in the congregation who give a lot of money? So I’d say, just have some freedom in your congregation. The Gospel is scandal and folly, you know? Some people are just going to reject it either way, so you might as well have fun with it.
[1] This, from an article which appeared in The Tribune in 1906, and can also be found in Chesterton’s book A Handful of Authors