Accepting (and Enjoying!) our Human Foolishness (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

Last updated on: May 16, 2016 at 12:22 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Accepting (and Enjoying!) our Human Foolishness (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 2016-05-16T12:22:29-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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My what fools . . .

We are foolish, but need not be Biblical fools.

Biblical fools destroy life and happiness by forgetting their place and thinking themselves wise. There is no fear of God or respect for law or order.

Yet we are also born children in the cosmos of God and the loving Father allows us to stumble and make mistakes. The Lord Jesus “grew” as a child. He could learn from His mother and father. Mistakes are not sins: the child who says 2+2 is 5 is not bad or damned, just learning. If we could not know better, then we just do not know. Humans often do not know . . . and so we are foolish in a lovable sort of way.

The Biblical fool is damned and hurts all around him. The child-fool knows that before God we are all children at play. Only God is great, good, and can afford to take Himself seriously . . . and God delights in the laughter of children. When He who can always be serious writes the Song of Solomon, we should relax.

The problem is that we are children in a broken world and that cosmic and moral law are not (always) suspended while we grow. If the child-like is hit by the law, then horrible things can result if we do not remember our limits. We are not gods. We are not perfected yet . . . we are not what we will be. The oldest man is still a child compared to the powers of Heaven and still capable of folly. If we recognize child-like folly, then there is hope. If we pretend we do not make mistakes, are not still ignorant (like little children), then we might become Biblical fools.

The Biblical fool turns his child-like nature into childishness. He comes to God not in the reverence of a youngster, but in the arrogance and destructiveness of the yob.

Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows how things can work out if we allow for childlike nature and do not merely become childish. There is a place for the simple, for the “foolish things,” without becoming the Biblical fool. The humane fool is like Bottom, he has the head of an ass, but there is no harm in him. Seen correctly, he makes life jolly. He is not a figure of romance (as he seems to believe at times), but a joyful jester. In his place, he is marvelous. The great danger is not the jolly fool, but the serious fool.

At the start of the play a father wishes to lay down the lay to his daughter. She is in love and the lover (as always) play the fool . . .and this need not turn into Biblical folly! The Father, applying the law, seems determined to force them to sin, to make errors, to become Biblical fools. Meanwhile, he is (perhaps) the only dangerous fool in his self-righteousness in the play. The father lacks paternal love for his daughter that would soften his application of law with a bit of “foolishness.”

Fortunately, this is a Shakespearean comedy not a tragedy so everything turns out for the best. Human love is taken seriously, but not so seriously that feelings cannot be rearranged to comport with what is best. The “faerie realm” brushes against humankind and things are adjusted. Here faerie represents the otherness, the sheer complexity of the cosmos. There are beings and beings and beings . . . a great chain of life that stretches up to the gulf between creatures who are given life and Life Himself. When the child-like of two different orders of beings run into each other, the folly of both are revealed and healed.

It is Midsummer Night after all! What could go wrong? It is the feast of John the Baptist, the forerunner of the Christ. It is a night of possibilities, but fortunately the shortest night of all! Our child-like dreams of what is to come are dangerous . . . in a good way if checked by reality . . . in a bad way if we stay asleep too long. Life isn’t but a dream and we forget that at our peril. Robin or Puck puts our condition best when he says:

Shall we their fond pageant see?
Lord, what fools these mortals be!

So we are, but we need not be Biblical fools. We can dash about the forest, knowing we often have ass heads, and laugh, marry, and love. Someday we will wake up and the King will come to take us to the Great Wedding.

And still there like children (though to us as we are now, we would seem very gods!), we will feast and play world without end.

Amen.

————————————————–

William Shakespeare went to God four hundred years ago. To recollect his death, I am writing a personal reflection on a few of his plays. The Winter’s Tale started things off, followed by As You Like It. Romeo and Juliet still matter, Lady Macbeth rebukes the lust for power, and Henry V is a hero. Richard II shows us not to presume on the grace of God or rebel against authority too easily. Coriolanus reminds us that our leaders need integrity and humility. Our life can be joyful if we realize that it is, at best, A Comedy of Errors. Hamlet needs to know himself better and talks to himself less. He is stuck with himself so he had better make his peace with God quickly and should stay far away from Ophelia. Shakespeare gets something wrong in Merchant of Venice . . . though not as badly as some in the English Labour Party or in my Twitter feed. Love if blind, but intellectualism is blind and impotent in Love’s Labours Lost. Brutus kills Caesar, but is overshadowed by him in Julius Caesar. We should learn not to make Much Ado about Nothing. We might all be Antony, but if we would avoid his fate then we must avoid flattery and the superficial love of Troilus and Cressida. We are fools, but our goal should be to accept it and not to degenerate into Biblical fools during our Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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