TOM SCHAEFER The divine gift of healing laughter

Swapping stories and chuckling about our family's foibles as we sit around the dining-room table is a particular pleasure of mine.
"Dad, when you got up on Saturday mornings to make us pancakes, you looked like a crazy man with your hair messed up," my kids recalled of their childhood during a family dinner.
"Still crazy after all these years," I responded with a grin. And everyone laughed.
Laughter has always carried us -- my wife, my kids and extended family -- through good times and bad.
When I think of laughter -- and another Father's Day -- I also remember my dad with his squinty grin and rat-a-tat-tat chuckle. No one loved a joke more than he. Dad, who died in 1980, could fire up a roomful of wallflowers and have the most introverted giggling with delight.
A hurtful edge
I agree that what the world needs now is love, but it also needs a healthy dose of laughter. Unfortunately, laughter isn't always set up in a good-natured or therapeutic way.
Much of what passes for humor has a mocking tone to it. It revels in the mistakes or shortcomings of others -- and not merely slip-on-a-banana-peel mishaps.
I confess I find some of it hard to resist. I laugh when I shouldn't. (Is that because such humor provides an escape from the harsh realities we endure every day?)
Humor seems to have an increasingly sharper edge to it. Just watch Comedy Central, and you'll know what I'm talking about. Comedy is coarser and more divisive. (Has politics been any nastier?) And if you don't join in the guffawing, then you're labeled a prude, a snob or someone too dense to appreciate "a good laugh."
The truth is, what seems funny to us says something about us: If we mock virtue, we accept vice. Not an admission many of us want to make.
Health benefits
To be sure, laughter can be healthy.
The late Norman Cousins, a notable editor and writer, proved the efficacy of humor when he was diagnosed in the mid-1960s with a life-threatening disease.
His doctors gave him little hope, so he devised his own medical regimen: He took massive doses of vitamin C and rented classic comedy movies -- Abbott and Costello, Charlie Chaplin. He watched one after the other, hour after hour, and the more he did, the more he laughed. And little by little he began to feel better. He called laughter "inner jogging."
Eventually, doctors could not find any trace of his incurable disease. It was 25 more years before he died, after cardiac arrest.
No one suggests that laughter cures all ills or soothes all pain, but it can release a good feeling about ourselves and others that is restorative and spiritually enriching.
Laughter in Scripture
That's because humor is a gift of God. The story of Abraham and Sarah in the Book of Genesis is a prime example.
At 90, Sarah was beyond her childbearing years, but God promised Abraham that Sarah would bear a child. When Sarah heard of the promise, she laughed.
Nine months later, Sarah gave birth to a child. God told Abraham to name the baby Isaac. The punch line? In Hebrew, Isaac means laughter. The joke, it turns out, was on Sarah.
Humor can have a positive purpose. It can help us move through whatever darkness we experience.
Although we rightly grieve over losses -- death, divorce, separation -- at some point a memory often triggers a smile. And welling up, a laugh. To suppress such a gift, or to smother it with unremitting grief or bitterness, prolongs the time of healing. The Healer says: Let it out.
On Father's Day, I will enjoy the company of my family. We'll likely tell stories about one another and smile over silly incidents. And I'll think of my father and his infectious laugh. That memory alone has the power to bring a smile to my face.
So, here's to humor and to the laughter it engenders. May Father's Day, and the days that follow, find you smiling, even through tears of loss.
XTom Schaefer writes about religion and ethics for the Wichita Eagle in Kansas.