Spiritual practices are great but have you tried being silly?
Tutu's marshmallows, Thurman's penguins, and the urgency of loosening up before we fall apart
“That’s so silly!” is the biggest compliment my three year old hands out. If you’ve done something worthy of the awe-inspiring title “silly,” well my friend, you’re doing something right.
The essay I was going to share this week got deleted somewhere in my Substack drafts and revisions when I pivoted from what was originally scheduled a few weeks ago to the Supreme Court analysis (which is long but I hope you’ll check out and let me know what you think).
So, today, instead of the post I deleted, I’ll try to offer an outline of the gist of what I hoped to say. Which in the radiant spirit of my toddler is simply this: find your silly again.
I’ve been reminding myself of these things — to be silly and chill out with normal people stuff — for a couple years now. But it was
’s piece from a few months ago that really got my wheels turning. In the midst of an excellent essay about how we deserve movements that care for us and don’t crush our joy, he slid in these gems about the great apartheid-fighting South African Bishop Desmond Tutu.Tutu’s joy should not be misinterpreted as unseriousness or naiveté. And while it’s easy, I suppose, to dismiss his constant delight as stemming from some magical source that is unavailable to the rest of us (“well, he was super religious, and I’m not” or “yeah, but he was just such an anomaly”), his was a deliberate and cultivated joy. He fed it through constant re-connection with the people he was struggling with and for. He was a collector (and sustainer) of pen pal relationships. He regularly returned to the same home for the elderly over and over again— first as a volunteer and then as a friend. He was intentionally disciplined (as somebody with a recognized addiction to validation from others) about the mix of daily rituals (prayer, meditation) and indulgences (cricket, music and literature, samosas and marshmallows) that might help balance his most self-centered impulses.
There’s a lot going on in this paragraph, but what struck me and has stayed with me now for a few months is arguably the most mundane portion:
and indulgences (cricket, music and literature, samosas and marshmallows)
Why does that stand out? Well, I think because so many of us beat ourselves up to maintain relationships, to be someone who volunteers, to practice our spiritual disciplines — and it can all feel at times like a forced effort of perfection, like if we could just be perfect at these things, then we could also be perfect at the BIG THINGS like fighting injustice the way Tutu did. It’s beautiful to want to show up fully in all those ways, but the whole attempt at perfecting ourselves around all of these “shoulds” can become a study in missing the forest for the trees.
The idea that Tutu embraced his indulgences as much as everything else in that paragraph, that the man’s love of marshmallows (for crying out loud!) was famous enough to make it into Garrett’s newsletter, flips a lot of that perfectionist thinking on its head. It reorients all of these actions — from his resistance to the racial capitalist apartheid oppressing his people, to his time spent in prayer and with elderly shut-ins — around a humbler, more graciously peccadilloed version of being human. It all flows from the same source.
I was hit by a similar revelation reading Howard Thurman’s autobiography earlier this summer. Toward the end of the book, he shares a number of short vignettes under the title “Mind Grazings.” They range from stories about his dogs, to his life-long struggle with crippling shyness, to his memories of MLK Jr. In the midst of all that, he describes beginning to paint late in life and offers us this paragraph.
My greatest joy has come from painting penguins. The initial inspiration came upon me during a visit to Vancouver. A penguin was hatched in the city zoo amid great excitement. On my way back east, I began sketching penguins. These developed into a series of oils, appropriately named “A Penguin on His First Date,” “Two Drunk Penguins,” “Penguin Politicians,” and so on. Several of my friends sent me illustrated books about penguins, hoping, I suspect, that some similarity might develop between my paintings and the real thing. But to no avail. I paint the Penguin’s View of Himself! When my friends say, “That doesn’t look like a penguin to me,” my answer is “Maybe not. But it does to the penguin.”
Folks, this is the spiritual father of the Civil Rights Movement, one of the most widely regarded mystics of the twentieth century, going on about painting penguins getting drunk together at a party. That’s hilarious. It’s so gloriously humanizing. I think this is precisely because it’s just so silly.
We make a lot of Thurman’s contemplative life, his brilliant sermons, his paradigm shifting books like Jesus and the Disinherited, his communing with trees and animals like a modern day Francis of Assisi, his impact of Dr. King. As well we should. I think, however, we would do well to also celebrate him as the man who badly painted drunk penguins and thought it was awesome.
What good is freedom — spiritual, economic, or political — if we are not free enough to enjoy normal human things? Are we truly free if we do not attain the inner security to do what others might find weird? Justice is just about getting life back to its proper starting line. Abundance is everything that lies beyond. Let’s not squelch it. Life is hard. It’s good to be silly.
My sense is this is part of what Trecia Hersey is talking about when she reminds us that rest is resistance and a component of what adrienne maree brown is calling for when she talks about recuperating the value of pleasure and lifts up a politics of feeling good. Particularly for Christians, we have a lot of spiritual baggage and theological tradition to contend with that denigrated creaturely life instead of celebrating these bodies (the very things, not disembodied souls, that get resurrected) and the gift of enfleshed sensory existence. I think, though, that I’m trying to push it beyond even “appreciating the body, appreciating that we are bodies” discourse into something like “appreciating that us embodied humans are weird, and weirdness is good, actually, and not only good but also fun, and fun is a large part of what makes humans human and humanity so freaking amazing.”
Kids make this easier, if you let them. Jesus had a lot to say about this, though we try as hard as we can to spiritualize it. Maybe Jesus knew that a movement of people repossessed by the silliness of childhood would make terrible emperors, soldiers, and money changers…I don’t know.
For me these days, it’s letting my self get “too into basketball season” (which is how I’ve been framing it — a sort of non-apology apology for embracing something frivolous and “time wasting”). It’s being “so silly” with my three year old and five month old. It’s writing bad haikus and sharing them with people. It’s not judging myself so harshly that I really like eating ice cream most days. And, yes, it’s also doing my morning contemplative routines with as much regularity as I can, going for runs and other things that start to slide into the sort of “practices” we more regularly laude.
I do worry that “normal people” (whoever they are) will read this and think it bizarre that I’m talking about something so obvious. But I know this can be an issue for me, and I know I’m not alone. I’m sure there are other groups who struggle with all this, but I know that for those of us who wrap our identities around our faith and spirituality, around doing justice and striving toward solidarity with the poor and oppressed, we can lose sight of the simple things that make life good. To celebrate and embrace the simple, silly things of life isn’t to cop out of “the work,” nor is it to justify bourgeois lifestyles and cultures. It’s simply to remind us to chill out and be human once in a while — to integrate, because otherwise there’s no way to sustain these commitments for a lifetime. Tutu and Thurman were in it for a lifetime. Being a cricket fanatic and a penguin painter were ways they not only stayed human in the midst of oppressive empires, but were ways they expressed their already full and inwardly-liberated humanity. These were simply expressions of integrated lives: ways their authentic selves poured out in the same way their vocations as leaders of spiritual and social transformation were authentic expressions of their true selves.
So what brings you joy that can’t be marketed or commodified?
What do you love that has nothing to do with the latest trending hobby?
What is that anti-instagramable, so-called waste of time that makes you happy?
What are the pleasures of life that aren’t about optimizing your productivity or body?
Were there things in you loved doing when you were a kid, before the eyes of every stranger started holding so much weight, that you secretly would still love to do?
What do you need to be truly safe enough to get truly silly?
What supposedly mundane but, in truth, authentic expressions of your true self could you stop tamping down?
Do you just need to watch a game and eat some marshmallows?
I’d love to hear.
A few reads & resources
One writer who always nails it (in part because he’s so deeply steeped in the W.E.B. du Bois cannon) and helps me justify our family’s NYT’s subscription is Jamelle Bouie. He spit some fire throughout this Supreme Court term, starting with a clear take about the Robert’s Court’s one consistency: it’s aggressively anti-worker agenda. He followed with a clear-eyed account of Justice Kagan’s bold critique that the court’s revocation of debt relief was unconstitutional and a reminder to always follow the money. Read this guy.
Racial Capitalism is a phrase I use regularly on here, but I’m aware it may not be familiar to everyone and the depth of meaning behind it isn’t immediately available. If you’d like to read an excellent introduction to the concept, here’s two: first is the classic by Robin D. G. Kelly in Boston Review “What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism?” and the second is a fantastic essay from Olúfémi O. Táíwó that I just finished reading called “A framework to help us understand the word.”
Writing statements of solidarity is something many leaders in the nonprofit, organizing, and faith worlds find themselves doing when bad things happen to people who don’t deserve it, acts often perpetrated against a group because of their identities. I remember seasons when it felt like we were having to make these every week and began to question the point. I do believe they still matter, but it’s crucial to do so well and within a broader context of solidaristic relationships and actions. Inevitably, none of us are a member of ever group with whom we wish to stand in solidarity, which presents challenges critical to wrestle with. The Building Movements Project recently released a guide to “Writing a Statement of Solidarity: Considerations and Process Questions” that I found quite strong and resonant with best practices learned through trial and mistakes.
Two Images of Restful Risings
I took these two pictures a few days apart during our family’s vacation this past week at Moosehead Lake in Northern Maine. The first is from the night we arrived and the second on an early morning when our baby wanted everyone up. There seems to me something important about the paralleling of this luminous darkness and filtered daybreak, both cresting the same horizon, with different songs to sing but somehow affirming one another in pentatonic harmony.
Good stuff, brother--keep 'em coming!
This is so great-- a real honor to have our pieces be in dialogue with each other.