I composed this in my mind one morning while the dentist had her way with my teeth. I’ve noted before in this space the delightful and surprising amount of laughter I hear in the halls and meeting rooms of my church. It even seems written into the ministers’ code that every sermon must contain two or three chuckle lines.
When I got home with my new tooth brush and tooth paste, I looked up laughter on an internet concordance that references the New International Version. Ten passages in the Bible contain the word “laughter,” six the word “cheerful,” six the word “happiness,” and three the word “smile.” Four other words—weep, cry, tears and sorrow—appear a total of 329 times.
To be fair, it’s encouraging to note that variations of “joy” appear 242 times, but is there something wrong with this picture for Christians charged with the mission to spread the word of God’s extravagant grace, love and salvation through Jesus Christ? I admit, before the theologians have cardiac arrest, that this is quick and dirty accounting, that the numbers are superficial and irrelevant. But, hey, I’m a disk jockey – superficial irrelevance is what I do.
A wise theologian—that’s not an oxymoron, it’s shameless flattery—once said that the Bible contains only a single medical prescription: “A cheerful heart is good medicine.” (Proverbs 17:22). And it turns out that it’s true.
Cribbing from some research I did for a speech to a sports oldtimers group recently, the value of laughter is recorded in the Koran: “He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.” Plato thought that even the gods love jokes and Pindar must have read the Old Testament: “The best of healers is good cheer.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow produced this bit of doggerel: “Joy, temperance and repose slam the door on the doctor’s nose.” G.K. Chesterton said angels fly because they take themselves lightly. A French doctor, Henri de Mondeville, wrote in the 14th century, “Let the surgeon take care to regulate the whole regimen of the patient’s life for joy and happiness, allowing his relatives and special friends to cheer him, and by having some one tell him jokes.”
Contemporary science has caught up with ancient wisdom. William Fry, professor of psychiatry at Stanford University Medical School, reports the average kindergarten student laughs 300 times a day. Yet, adults average just 17 laughs a day. Other medical research concludes that it is possible for all 400 muscles of the body to move during laughter. If you could sustain a belly-laugh for one full hour, you could lose up to 500 calories! Whenever we laugh we release a wave of chemicals through the body including the endorphin hormone, the body’s natural pain relaxant which is also released during healthy exercise. After laughter, both heart rate and blood pressure drop to a point that is lower than its initial resting rate.
Dr Lee Berk at Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California shows that laughter, happiness and joy inspire the immune system to create white “T” cells, which help to prevent infection. He also found that laughter appears to reduce serum levels of cortisol, dopac, adrenaline and growth hormone, thereby creating a reverse effect to the classical hormone response during times of stress.
I notice that the cost of living hasn’t affected its popularity. More than 60,000 people in the United States are over the age of 100. The US Census predicts that the number of people 85 and over will more than double over the next 25 years and estimates there will be more than 800,000 people 100 and over by 2050. It has a lot to do with attitude. One researcher found that people over 100 all stayed engaged with life, were able to cope with loss and had both a sense of humour and hope.
It seems to me that “a sense of humour and hope” is a pretty good prerequisite for a wannabe Christian. Not bad for a morning at the dentist.
