In my reading, I’ve several times now run into the idea of a gentle sense of humor as being a godly power, linked closely to love and faith. It is an intriguing concept. Please consider the following three quotations, ordered both by length (the first is a fairly lengthy account) and by the chronology of my reading. I’ll provide some brief commentary between quotes.

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From F. Enzio Bushe’s Yearning For the Living God

The following experience is probably one of the most sacred in my whole life. It happened in the very beginning of my service as a General Authority, after I moved to the United States. I was still very new and inexperienced and I had to rely completely on the Spirit to be able to do the many things I had to do.

On one trip, on assignment as an executive administrator, I gave a talk on welfare to a lovely group of people. I taught them in a special meeting and spoke about faith and the dimensions of faith and the importance of developing it. I quoted Matthew 17 to explain how the Lord expected his disciples to have faith and how frustrated He was when they did not have enough faith to cast out an evil spirit. I quoted that scripture in order to show our need not only to view faith as thought or feeling, but also as a power with which we can control or even change the circumstance of this world.

That evening, I began a tour of a neighboring mission and stayed in the basement of the mission home that night. I was very tired when I finally went to bed at around 11:00. I fell sound asleep as soon as I was in bed. I woke with a start when, at about 1:00 A.M., the mission president came into my room. The light was on and he was speaking to me, but I was still half asleep and did not understand what he was saying. I asked him if what he had to say could not wait until tomorrow. I could see that he was disappointed, but he nodded his head and began to leave the room.

By then, I was more awake and called him back and asked him to repeat the problem. I focused on listening to him and was surprised by what he said. He said that in the evening, a missionary had been possessed by an evil spirit. His companion had called the assistants to help cast it out. The assistants had gone and done that, but as they got back to their own apartment, the evil spirit had entered one of the assistants. The other was so shocked that he did not know what to do, so he went straight to the mission home.

The mission president was appalled, of course, because this was not just an ordinary missionary. This was one of the stalwart, experienced missionaries who was speaking gibberish and not in control of his physical movements. The mission president had tried to cast out the evil spirit but had failed. He began to panic, but then he realized that he had a General Authority in the basement. That was when he came down to try to wake me up.

After he told me, it hit me like a hammer that the very day I had been speaking about that scripture from Matthew, I was confronted with the same situation. I was under the watchful eye of the Lord and would have to prove my faith or show my lack of it.

I was very uncomfortable and asked the mission president to give me a little time. I wanted to get dressed first. I immediately began to pray with a deep, fervent plea for help. I felt so helpless because I had never been in a situation like that. Crazy thoughts came to my mind. For instance, I wished I had stayed in a motel, but I knew there was no way to escape.

I finally dressed and had no further excuse to tarry longer, so I went upstairs. As I went up, I heard noises and unintelligible sounds, and fear began to creep into my heart. I felt that fear come from the ground, from below, trying to sneak into my system. I could understand why, when people are afraid, their knees begin to shake. When I got to the living room, I saw the elder sitting in a chair, shaking all over, making uncontrolled movements, speaking with foam on his lips. His companion and the mission president and his family were all staring at the spectacle with shock and fear.

As I entered the room, it was like a voice said to me, “Brother Busche, you must make a decision now.” I knew immediately what decision it was. I had to decide whether to join the fear and amazement and helplessness or to let faith act and let courage come in. I knew, of course, that I wanted to have faith. I wanted to have the power, the priesthood power, and I wanted to know what to do to save the situation.

In that moment, two scriptures came into my mind. One scripture was very simple: Moroni 8:16, “perfect love casteth out all fear.” And the other was the same: 1 John 4:18, “Perfect love casteth out fear.” But I did not have love. I had fear. What do we do when we have fear but not love? My mind was drawn to Moroni 7:48, where the Lord points out how we can gain love: “Wherefore …pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love.”

I prayed with all the energy of my heart, “Father, fill my soul with love.” I cried from the depths of my being, without wasting any time. It all happened in a split second. After that, it was as if my skull was opened and a warm feeling poured down into my soul – down my head, my neck, my chest. As it was pouring down, it drove out all of the fear. My shivering knees stopped shaking. I stood there, a big smile came to my face – a smile of deep, satisfying joy and confidence.

Suddenly, those in the room looked not scary, but amusing. It was just funny to see them all there. I learned in that moment that when we are under the influence of the spirit, we can find a sense of humor and the ability to smile and not take ourselves too seriously, and we can laugh at ourselves. Then it dawned on me that the adversary’s weapons are sarcasm, irony, and cynicism, but that the Lord’s power is a gentle sense of humor. I have learned more and more since then that the adversary cannot deal with a sense of humor. He does not have a sense of humor, he does not even know what that is. He is always dead serious, and when you have a sense of humor, you are in control of the adversary’s influence.

I still did not know what to do. I had great confidence, but I did not know what to do with it.

As I stood there, it was as though someone came and put his arm around me and said, “Let me do this for you. I can take it from here.” I was very happy with that idea. Then I watched myself do something very strange and surprising because I did not know what I was doing. I went to that young man who was sitting on a chair shaking uncontrollably. I knelt in front of him and put my arms around him, pulling him gently to my chest. I told him, with all the strength of my soul, “I love you, my brother.”

In the very moment I did that, the evil spirit left. The missionary came to his senses, looked at me and said, “I love you, too.” He snapped right out of it and asked what had happened. For about an hour after that, we had a spontaneous sharing of testimonies, jubilantly praising God and singing and praying. It was an exuberant experience of the workings of the spirit of love, which is the Spirit of Christ and by it overcoming all evil.

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Elder Bushe prayed for and received charity, and then even demonic possession seemed no longer terrifying but amusing. And then, interestingly, Elder Bushe “watched [him]self do something very strange”–as if he too was under a very different kind of possession. He cast out the devil with a hug. This story indicates–and daily experience confirms–that “the spirit of love” enables us to see the discrepancy between how things are and how God wills them to be as momentary, inessential, and amusing. The startling claim that “the Lord’s power is a gentle sense of humor” should probably not be read as a rigorous theological definition, but rather as identifying one aspect of God’s power.

I perceive a connection to a quote I learned in college that has stuck with me: “A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” (Modified from a passage by novelist Dinah Mulock Craik). In Elder Bushe’s story, the “breath of kindness” includes a good chuckle. Might we imagine Jesus as a titan of gentle mirth, sifting the world in his hands and laughing into oblivion all that is at enmity with joy?

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My second quotation is from Reinhold Niebuhr, from an essay called “Humor and Faith.” Thanks go to Elder Garret W. Gong for quoting part of the following in a BYU commencement address and to my brother Daniel for sharing the address with me.

Niebuhr discusses how some critics have faulted the Bible with lacking a sense of humor. He responds as follows:

This supposed defect will, however, appear less remarkable if the relation of humour to faith is understood. Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer. Laughter must be heard in the outer courts of religion; and the echoes of it should resound in the sanctuary; but there is no laughter in the holy of holies. There laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith.

The intimate relation between humour and faith is derived from the fact that both deal with the incongruities of our existence. Humour is concerned with the immediate incongruities of life and faith with the ultimate ones. Both humour and faith and expressions of the freedom of the human spirit, of its capacity to stand outside of life, and itself, and view the whole scene. But any view of the whole immediately creates the problem of how the incongruities of life are to be dealt with; for the effort to understand the life, and our place in it, confronts us with inconsistencies and incongruities which do not fit into any neat picture of the whole. Laughter is our reaction to immediate incongruities and those which do not affect us essentially. Faith is the only possible response to the ultimate incongruities of existence which threaten the very meaning of our life.

We laugh at what? At the sight of a fool upon the throne of the king, or the proud man suffering from some indignity, or the child introducing its irrelevancies into the conversation of the mature. We laugh at the juxtaposition of things which do not fit together. . . . Thus we deal with immediate incongruities, in which we are not too seriously involved and which open no gap in the coherence of life in such a way as to threaten us essentially.

But there are profound incongruities which contain such a threat. Man’s very position in the universe is incongruous. That is the Problem of faith, and not of humour. Man is so great and yet so small, so significant and yet so insignificant. “On the one hand,” says Edward Bellamy, “is the personal life of man, an atom, a grain of sand on a boundless shore, a bubble of a foam flecked ocean, a life bearing a proportion to the mass of past, present and future, so infinitesimal as to defy the imagination. On the other hand is a certain other life, as it were a spark of the universal life, insatiable in aspiration, greedy of infinity, asserting solidarity with all things and all existence, even while subject to the limitations of space and time.” That is the contrast.

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Niebuhr goes on to argue that philosophy cannot resolve this incongruity, because reason can only view life from one vantage or the other, and therefore consistently attempts to reduce one aspect of man’s existence to the other. Either everything is material or everything is Idea. This denies the incongruity rather than resolving it. Only faith can reduce the tension to a tolerable level for the finite mortal being who is also a spirit akin to the stars, longing for everlasting burnings and eternal fellowship. Meanwhile, we laugh at the foibles of our fellows, with “a nice mixture of mercy and judgment, of censure and forbearance. We would not laugh if we regarded these foibles as altogether fitting and proper. There is judgment, therefore, in our laughter. But we also prove by the laughter that we do not take the annoyance too seriously.”

It does seem to me that being truly merciful and just–or, in other words, charitable–entails a combination of clear-eyed recognition of human evil wherever it is found and a cheerful swallowing up of that evil in the hope of future good and the expunging of the evil that one is determined to do one’s part, however painful, to bring about. In matters of human evil, the incongruity is not the ontological gap Nieburh points out, but the moral gap between reality and justice. Where one’s own heart is big enough to bridge the gap, humor is a catalyst as well as a result of the bridging process. A self-reinforcing loop of hope, humor, and kindness is then the form that charity takes. Perhaps this is the ascending spiral on which charity is always running, in contrast to the couch-sitting, small-minded grumpiness that is so easy, so natural, and so miserable. But where the gap is too wide for us, the gentle sense of humor that is a Godly power must be converted into what Niebuhr calls “bitter humour” unless we trust in some heart that is bigger than ours and more capable of swallowing vast evil with love. Yet Elder Bushe’s experience suggests that sometimes this divine heart can become our own, and we can walk chuckling into battle and drive out devils with hugs.

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My final quotation is from A. W. Tozer, a famous evangelical pastor. I found this quote by searching the exact phrase “gentle sense of humor” on Google–while attempting, unsuccessfully, to find the Bushe story somewhere online that could be copied and pasted. I was aware of Tozer because of a good friend who is also an evangelical pastor, so I was intrigued to find that he too had used the exact same phrase. Let this Tozer quotation serve as the period to this essay.

“Few things are as useful in the Christian life as a gentle sense of humor[.]”

Click to access Tozer_TheBestOfTozer.pdf