Blessed Are the Fools

While swapping Valentine’s Day stories with a friend last week, my brain, without warning, handed me a memory I had successfully ignored for decades. It was second grade, and I had a crush on a boy named Josh.

In that particular era of grocery store valentines — those mass-produced rectangles featuring Saturday morning cartoon characters — each card bore a pre-printed message with the potential to carry some serious social weight. One had to be thoughtful about their distribution. A safe choice for a boy might be something like Ur Cool or a breezy Cowabunga! Happy Valentine’s! — you know, friendly, but also uninvolved. A greeting you might also say to your mailman. I was normally careful about this sort of thing.

But that year, I got a little reckless. On Josh’s valentine — and only his — I drew a little heart next to my name. Nothing crazy, just a quiet, secret act of affection. I was convinced he wouldn’t see it. It was not a response from him that I craved, anyway, but the quiet thrill of declaring my unspoken crush.

I pushed this secret message through the slot in Josh’s decorated shoebox, and continued making my rounds, dropping my less-embellished valentines into their proper places. Soon, little mountains of paper messages covered our desks. We sorted through them with sticky fingers, stained pink from the cupcakes Bridget’s mom had sent that morning.

Later, as we lined up in the alcove between classrooms to wash our hands, I found myself behind Josh and Todd. I was minding my own business when Josh turned to Todd and said:

”Elizabeth drew a heart on my valentine. Did she draw a heart on yours?”

”No,” Todd said. “No heart.”

“She didn’t draw one on Derek’s either,” Josh continued. Now he was in full Sherlock Holmes mode, and it was making me twitchy. “She didn’t draw a heart on anyone else’s on my row.”

My chest, then my shoulders, then my entire head went up in flames.

The boys looked at me and giggled. I wondered if I could make myself disappear by sheer force of will, but despite my best efforts, I remained painfully present.

“I didn’t draw any heart!” I blurted.

This was a bold-faced lie. Immediately disprovable. They laughed harder, and I knew that my secret crush had been laid gloriously bare. Yet in that exposure — when I was forced to stare both Josh and reality right in the face — there was, strangely, a kind of grace. I was mortified, but I also experienced something that felt a whole lot like relief.

Over the past few years, I’ve been practicing the art of personal essays — retellings of memories that, for me, mostly revolve around sad or embarrassing episodes. What’s interesting is that in the retelling, these once-crushing events emerge as comedies rather than tragedies. This isn’t contrived. It’s just what happens naturally because it’s what’s true: the way we humans posture ourselves against reality is endlessly funny. Our earnest attempts at being something more than we are is downright hilarious.

Take this little girl on Valentine’s Day — so sure she was smarter than the average second grader, so convinced she lived in a world where she could both confess and conceal her feelings at the same time. She was trying to participate in life as something more than human. And the inevitable end was to watch it all unravel at her feet.

But this is the nature of comedy in the classical sense. Tragedies end in funerals; comedies end in wedding feasts. And the only way to the feast is through exposure. The masks must come off. The lies must be unraveled. It is only under this banner of truth that we can throw the party.

This is, of course, also the path of the gospel. To enter the feast, we must first be found out. We must declare ourselves fools. But here is the great and terrible joke of the gospel: this place of emptiness is where we actually do get to become more than we are. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says in the Beatitudes, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” — which is another way of saying, Blessed are the fools, for they will be crowned kings and queens.

Frederick Buechner, in his book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy & Fairy Tale, puts it like this, “Blessed is he who is not offended that no man receives what he deserves but vastly more. Blessed is he who gets that joke.”

The unexpected, hilarious turn of the gospel is that at our moment of exposure we brace ourselves for a funeral, and what we get instead is a banquet. Every time we choke out an apology to our kids for losing our temper, every time we own up to a mistake at work, every time we drag some hidden thing into the light — these are the moments that feel like they should come with a death sentence. But instead, the Father comes running, slips a ring on our finger, and says, “Let’s throw a party.” If we Christians have any sense at all, we should be the first to laugh. “Be of good cheer,” Jesus said, “For I have overcome the world.”

This is what I want more than anything — to be one of the merry ones at the final wedding feast. To enter as one exposed and empty-handed, only to be ushered to the head of the table. And then, at last, to laugh.

Oh, how we were foolish. Oh, how we will laugh.