Laugh: Practice Resurrection Stories
“Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.”
I first saw the photo in a school yearbook in the summer of 1982. It changed my life.
I was leaving my sixth grade year and looking ahead to middle school, and feeling a bit nervous about entering the atmosphere of, what I presumed to be, a more sophisticated and intimidating peer group. In a bout of pre-teen insecurity I turned to the yearbook like a social media feed, sizing up the crowd I’d be facing, scrolling through each posed headshot, and fixating on the most self-assured and put-together. The more pages I turned, the smaller I felt.
Then I turned the yearbook page to this snapshot.
I leaned over the page like I was accepting a hug from the gangly arms of this goofball and made a decision that would end up changing the entire course of my life.
Before I saw the photo I didn’t really know the world held a Brian Murphy. Even though we attended the same tiny school together, he was a grade above me. The realization that I wanted to be Brian’s friend burrowed its way through the hormonal fog and rooted itself as a quiet vow that gave direction through so many foolish attempts to belong in all the wrong places.
Added to the normative developmental angst, I’d spent my childhood in a Christian subculture that took itself very seriously. While my parents created many spaces for laughter and play (my mom being the Queen of party games and my dad the King of punny Halloween costumes, for example) I carried a lot of seriousness and sadness in my twelve-year-old body.
Then this guy shows up in my yearbook looking absolutely ridiculous and proud of it.
It’s true that boyish grin did its work in my little vernal heart. (To this day, that grin slays me.) More than that, I think I intuited immediately, This is someone who will make me laugh.
By winter of my seventh-grade year I found myself in Brian’s orbit. Me a fresh-faced cheerleader in a uniform that hung below my knees and Brian a Junior High basketball player, not yet actually tall but playing already like he was. That unspoken vow I made to myself when I saw his yearbook picture, sporting his best wacky get-up for Spirit Week, became true.
Brian Murphy and I became friends.
Brian Murphy, indeed, made me laugh.
Obviously there’s a whole bunch of other things that happened to us and between us as we kept growing up into ourselves and I learned the other parts of Brian’s personality. I learned about the sadness and insecurity underneath that goofy get-up and he learned the fear and shame and sadness I carried within me. We learned pretty quickly we could make each other cry. Like heartbreaking kinds of tears. That still happens occasionally to this day.
But the most true thing is that, almost forty years since I first saw that photo, Brian Murphy is still my friend.
My memory of this photo is different than what is actually there.When I study the photo now, I’m surprised that Brian looks like a young boy. That wasn’t what I perceived when I first looked. Somehow the truest part of myself discerned something essential about that kid behind the (women’s?) sunglasses and grandpa blazer. I intuited the heart of a good man I’d want to know for the rest of my life.
We’ve had decades now to measure the depths and heights and length and breadth of somethings that’s, in fact, immeasurable. I’m still walking into that hug every single day. That’s our best solution for finding joy even though we consider all the facts of within us and around us.
Even then - especially then - Brian Murphy still makes me laugh. It’s his gift of love to me and to everyone who loves him.
I still take myself and everything around me too seriously. I think Brian would say that my gift of deep and direct knowing into the nature of people has been a gift to him. On our best days, maybe the yin and yang of our relationships makes the knowing more joyful and the laughter more substantial. Thinking about that feels precipitously close to taking the whole thing too seriously. It’s better that we just keep welcoming each other and leaning toward each other.
Laughter is an act of practicing resurrection. We expect the end of the world, we consider all the facts, and we carry on in a revolutionary joy.
It’s almost forty years since I first locked eyes with that face in the photograph. At some point - maybe when I was working on the yearbook staff in high school - I happened on the original print cleaning out old boxes of photos. Now it sits, framed, on my dresser to remind me every morning as I’m sizing myself up for whatever serious and meaningful conversations await me in my appointment book. No matter what I’m brooding over, the guy in the photo is irresistible. I can’t not laugh.
I move back into my day carrying the laughter like the feeling of a hug that lingers long after its over. It’s been a serious few years for us personally and for the world at large. The laughter feels harder to come by and, I confess, to responding to Brian with eye rolls and indifference more often than I care to admit. This little act of remembering is a momentary practice of resurrection. As we number our days into the second half of our lives, I want to lean toward the laughter.
I look at the photo again and renew my vow.