Whoopee Cushions
Whoopee
Cushions
“All your
children will be taught by the Lord, and they will have much peace.”
Isaiah 54:13
Just
as I was beginning to ask God where my next thought to write would come from,
and how I was going to write with the kids bantering and bugging each other
loudly (needing my refereeing every 8-minutes), my daughter asked me to pull
down a stash of toys I had shoved away into one of the dark corners of her
closet. In desperation for a quiet moment to write - and seeking that potential
quiet in the entertainment of resurrected toys - I pulled down the bag she
requested. On top was a whoopee cushion, long forgotten by both of us. “Look
brother!! A whoopee cushion!!” she squealed. Which immediately sent his mental
gears spinning and made him remember the electronic sound gadget lurking in his
own closet. “Buuuurrrruup!”
You don’t need quiet writing time.
Enjoy the multiple loud gaseous noises and laugh and write.
Love you.
God.
Of
course, the interest in the whoopee cushion and the noise machine fell within
the predictable 8-minute attention span, and the kids were quickly on to
playing with stuffed animals, pillows, and blankets – imagining that they were
wandering and camping to escape trolls that could crush couches in half.
Suddenly, an avalanche rolled through their realm of pretend and so they were
working to escape trolls and the
rock-slide. They escaped by running off to an ice palace, and felt welcomed
home in their new destination - Whew! But they entered wondering if this was
really a home or a hotel? The “warm” welcome of the ice palace, and the query
of home or hotel lasted all of about 30 seconds as they realized the ice was
freezing them, and a magically appearing special portal was quickly imagined to
return them to an even safer, warmer, pretend home. The safer home apparently
materialized upstairs and I could no longer overhear all the details of their
play and a relative quiet emerged. For about 8-minutes.
In
this rapidly changing boisterous play, with its gaseous expellations, trolls,
avalanches, ice houses, and magic portals, I also heard from within: “I tell
you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will
never enter the Kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). And I wondered back, how do
I apply this? I’m the Mom. Isn’t there also written “When I was a child, I
talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I
became a [wo]man I put the ways of childhood behind me” (1 Corinthians 13:11)?
Does this mean I should or shouldn’t sit on the whoopee cushion to contemplate
that paradox?
There
it is. This is where cynicism for the apparent disparities of Biblical teachings
last crept in. It crept into my adolescence, into my twenties, and into my
thirties, when things being clear and making sense, being logical, scientific,
provable, serious, and responsible seemed most important. So I choose, now, to
contemplate while sitting on the whoopee cushion. Today I see God’s answer to my
quest for quiet peace comes to me – today in the noise. So it goes. The binary
nonsense of being human. The mysteriously synchronous dichotomies of living
with little humans. This is the place where the Bible begins to make living
sense for me again. Where the sacred space between deep cleansing breaths and the
artificial sounds of passing gas can both be holy. Where, impossibly so, I can
be both adult and child, peaceful and raucous at the same time.
Thank
you Lord for your teaching. For using whoopee cushion contemplations; for using
raucous noises that bring quiet to the soul; for using ridiculous nonsense that
helps makes sense of everything; for using a universe full of synchronous
dichotomies; for using the big words that explain little things, and their
little words that so often explain big things. Thank you God for making this
peace and this joy and this writing. Amen.
