Catholics and Humor

In a recent podcast available on Twoedgetalk, Deacon Tim and Cyndi discuss Catholics, happiness and humor. Is it a coincidence that two top comedians, Stephen Colbert and Jim Gaffigan, are both Catholics? When he was 10 years old, Colbert's father and 2 brothers were killed in a plane crash.  In a 2015 interview in GQ, Colbert said:  "I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” The interviewer asked him to explain. Quoting Tokien, Colbert said, "What punishments of God are not gifts?" Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “What punishments of God are not gifts?” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head...It's not the same thing as wanting to have it to have happened. But you can't change everything about the world. You certainly can't change things that have already happened."

Saint Paul of the Cross wrote beautifully about this: "Love is a unifying virtue which takes upon itself the torments of its beloved Lord. It is a fire reaching through to the inmost soul. It transforms the lover into the one loved. More deeply, love intermingles with grief, and grief with love, and a certain blending of love and grief occurs. They become so united that we can no longer distinguish love from grief nor grief from love. Thus the loving heart rejoices in its sorrow and exults in its grieving love."