Chimps, Orang-utans and God
Look I know about parasites that eat the eyes out of children and mosquitoes that carry malaria and predatory bacteria that hunt the human race. I’ve spoken about this at some length in various writings. I mention this to make the point that like everyone else that has some common sense I have no Pollyannish view of life. So when I speak of the humor, the pleasure, the delight and the warm silliness that much of life has and brings, you should know that I haven’t taken leave of this world. There are harsh and ugly realities in life but that’s far from all that’s on offer even in this world.
If someone tells me that marriage is a tough road with plenty of grim slogging and more than a few pains and disappointments on the way, what can I do but agree? But if anyone that tells me that that’s the whole story of marriage I’ll tell him to dream on. It hasn’t been my marriage and if I can believe the tens of thousands that witness to their joys and delights, my own wild and glorious ride of coming up on fifty-two years is not at all unusual.
Like almost everyone else, I suppose, I can rehearse a lot of pain, vividly recall moments I would never want to experience again and remember excruciating losses. But like everyone else I have known times of falling-down, side-splitting, stomach-aching laughter; times when my Ethel and I smiled till our faces hurt.
I remember as though it was yesterday, that many years ago she and I lay in bed talking and I got my tongue all tangled up. She began to titter and then to laugh out loud and found it difficult to stop. I was the tiniest bit miffed at the pleasure she was getting out of it all. “What’s so funny?” She could barely respond for laughing but finally blurted out, “You made a midake.” Now she had tangled her tongue up and we both began to screech with silly laughter. Ethel, now laughing more at her “midake,” and my laughing at the irony of it, we were nearly insane, rolling with stomach pains, sobering for a second and then bursting into another mirth-quake. Suddenly the door burst open and our son George, whose room was across the hall, wakened out of a sound sleep, indignantly wanted to know if we knew it was nearly three in the morning. We were screeching and he fumbled his speech and we went berserk. What made it even funnier was his serious indignation. We couldn’t tell him for squawking and as he stomped out of the room unimpressed, we looked at each other and off we went into another gale of gut-wrenching, pain-bringing, headache-hastening laughter. I thought I heard him mumbling complaints to himself in his room across the hall.
I like God because he brings laughter into our lives and if that is one of his gifts it says something about him! He says he delights in showing mercy and that tells you something about his character. If he delights in giving us laughter, that tells us something about his character. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not a gloomy and baleful figure, murderous at heart like bloodthirsty Kali. He doesn’t burn with vindictive resentment like a Zeus or ceaselessly snarl like the god of the poor legalists. He creates and takes pleasure in the works of his hands. He rejoices in the things that he has made. The psalmist tells the nations of the world to rejoice because Yahweh is Lord. The simple but truthful little hymn says, “All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.” Yes, all right, there are other realities in the world but for the vast majority of us (at least in the West) we have no grounds to mutter on and on morbidly about harsh realities. The fault dear Brutus, said Shakespeare, is not in the gods but in us. Morbidity is not the fruit of the creation—it most often lies—I would suggest—in us. It wasn’t Christmas that needed to be changed—it was Scrooge! And when he changed, Christmas changed!
I confess with some regret that I’m not able to rejoice greatly in flowers and gardens and forests. I recognize that I’m the one that loses out here. But the sight of acres of daisies or buttercups, miles of green fields, skies of blue and fluffy clouds that rise right up into God’s own living room can move even me. The pleasure of watching a tiny kitten (or several) “attacking” the mother that sits there patiently while the baby bites on her ear or paws at her back is a lovely experience. To watch pups climb all over a little boy or girl and hear the children giggle hysterically is one of the wonders of the world. I like God for giving us such sights and sounds.
Many years ago I went to the Dublin Zoo and believe me when I tell you that I actually saw what I’m about to describe.
I watched a whole company of chimpanzees in an enclosure, having the time of their lives (or so it looked). There were three or four hunkering down the way people do and they were watching the girls go by (girl chimps). Eyeing them as they passed by; the way boys do on the corners (or at least the way we used to do). One of them really eyed this pretty thing as she minced by without giving him a glance. As she just got past him, he leaned over and rattled her rear end with the back of his hand and then looked the other way and around him as if he hadn’t done it. I nearly fell down laughing. I half expected the three or four “corner boys” to look at each other and grin. “Nice one, Harry!” I can hear them chuckle while he smirked, pleased with himself.
I went from there to where the great apes were. They were enclosed behind heavy glass windows and there was a rail that separated us from the window with maybe a couple of feet between. One big fellow gave us some attention, pulling faces and acting up. Two or three kids were enjoying him no end and they were leaning over the rail to get as close to him as possible. He looked at them, I thought, with a bit of special interest and then turned his back to us, leaned against the window without movement, while the kids leaned farther and farther in toward the window. Suddenly he turned and went “boo” and scared the livin’ daylights out of the kids before walking away apparently satisfied with himself. [He didn’t really say “boo” but I can’t spell the sound he made; still, it clearly functioned as a “boo”.]
Finally, I went to see the long-legged monkeys that they had on a little island in the middle of a big pond. Frequently they would burst out into whooping. The whoop would begin moderately but would increase in volume until it was (not quite) deafening. The kids loved it and tried to get the monkeys to get on with it. Immediately across from where we were watching the whoopers was an orang-utan enclosure. There was a young lady there (I read her name but I’ve forgotten it). She gave us a very languid performance of hanging and lounging and sitting examining her tummy and smiling at us with those big teeth and eyes of hers. She was obviously enjoying our attention but just at that point the whoopers went into one of their sessions. We looked around and then back at our lady friend and she yawned a big yawn and gave a scornful slow-handclap. She wasn’t impressed with the whoopers and wanted us to know it.
I’ve been to a few zoos in my life (not many) but that was one memorable day and I can’t help thinking as I reflect on it that God must have a sense of humour. I don’t even mean the “laugh at a good joke” type humour. No, I mean there must be an aspect of him that leads him to look at such things and smile with pleasure and say again what he said in Genesis 1, “Now that’s good!” I think God gets cross when he witnesses cruelty to animals but I think it’s more than that. I think God finds pleasure in ostriches and armadillos, koalas and camels, eagles and donkeys, foals and kittens and puppies, fish and whales and kangaroos and the whole animal world. The psalmist (104) says they all look to God for their food and he provides for them. Yes, yes—yes! I know there are other things to be said—but not here and not at this moment.
How can we say God has no sense of humour when he made kittens and orang-utans, penguins and a duck-billed platypus? And colours? In the movie Colour Purple, Sugar and Celie were walking together through the fields and Sugar says that everything wants to be loved and urges Celie to look at how the trees wave to attract attention. Then she says, “I think God gets irritated when people walk by and don’t even notice the colour purple.” Maybe she was right. Well, whether we all can get pleasure in these things, God can, and that tells me something about him.
I remember on a visit to Thailand I saw the sun going down. The horizon must have been about a hundred yards from me and the sun came to within fifty feet of me (it had to be that close). It filled the whole sky. It was a mingled orange and red and yellow—all soft, none of it harsh on the eyes, smooth and liquid and big and perfectly round. “You ever see anything like me?” it whispered to me as it sat there for half of forever, just letting me gaze dumbfounded, before it silently slipped down behind the rim of the earth, eventually leaving the sky a gorgeous black velvet.
The world would be one gloomy old spinning Alcatraz if there was no laughter in it. If we believe God put music and colour and beauty in it, where do we think the laughter came from?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the Abiding Word.com.