"Soap...................................."

With Frank Sinatra in the background crooning “Send In the Clowns”, a video clip sent to me by my sister-in-law provided segments of comedy skits from the early days of television: Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Milton Berle, Red Skelton - the list too long to continue. It was simple, “clean” humor, slapstick stupidity that, as Orson Welles put it near the end, was more of a “beautiful, exuberant, childlike zaniness”, the veteran actor pondering if it all was just “the product of a different time, another generation”. Indeed, it does seem as if not only are the great ones gone, but their spirit, their style, of laughter is no more as well. Do we explain such loss as merely a matter of what amuses us having evolved? Or would it be closer to truth to say that we, as a society, have passed through a metamorphosis? I watched a bit of history on the Smothers Brothers the other day, remembering how the pair, in the late sixties, took humor into another arena. Moral issues and politics became the targets of opinionated ridicule, succeeding to the point of Saturday Night Live opening in seventy-five with no holds barred; and, from there, depending on your personal perspective, it’s been a downhill slide into the mud. The world will always be the world, of course; humanity has always been humanity; but where, I wonder, is the Church? If Christ “in” us be a living reality rather than a debatable proposition, then why do we not influence more that which we inhabit on a daily basis? Could it be that we’re just too busy swinging our swords and tilting at windmills, demanding that we, alone, possess truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Maybe we just need to concentrate more on our becoming better vessels through which He can, Himself, be manifested unto the mass……..