Monastic Humor

“There was a man in our [monastic] community who was always prompt, studious, generally serious, and obviously destined for a role among the hierarchy. He was a perfect target for monastic humor.

One night he arrived at his room to find life-sized statues of a male and female saint lying next to each other in his bed. On another occasion, just to add a spice of humility to his habit of promptness, some of his more thoughtful confreres unscrewed the handles on his door, so that when the bell for vespers rang, no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t get the door open.

What is the humor within the joke here? Don’t saints sleep together? Don’t we know from Pygmalion that statues have their own private lies? Aren’t we always locked in when we have important things to do elsewhere?”
—Meditations on the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life

We want our lives to be so neat and tidy. We want everything to fit, and nothing to be ambiguous, messy and certainly not flawed. But enlightened living is not having it all together. It’s seeing that it’s all a big mess, and being able to embrace the mess with humor and with love.