Wednesday November 24, 2004
The old, old stories
Our flight landed in Calgary ten minutes early. Then it came to a stop, because our gate had not yet been vacated by the previous flight.
WestJet\’s flight attendants started telling jokes to pass time while we waited.
Paddy O\’Furniture.
Ralph Milton collects jokes. He says that jokes travel in cycles. People send him jokes, and about three years later another group of people send him the same jokes, all over again.
So maybe some people hadn\’t heard WestJet\’s jokes the first time around.
Ground beef.
That\’s silly – a dog with no legs can\’t come no matter what you call him.
It\’s almost as if the joke is better for having heard it before.
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For a lighter look at ethics, faith, and life, I recommend Ralph Milton\’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it at the Wood Lake Books home page in Ralph Milton\’s Site, or by sending a note directly to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
It\’s also worth pursuing Richard Fairchild\’s United Online site. Another site worth visiting is David Keating\’s \”SeemslikeGod\” page.
Maybe stories are like that, too. When my family gets together, the favorite stories are always the ones we\’ve heard before. And once again, we go into gales of laughter about the way our son used to swipe the icing off our daughter\’s carrot cake. Or the time Joan fell through the seat of a lawn chair. Or the way my parents\’ dog farted under the card table…
I wonder, if I had been huddled around a campfire during the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the desert, would I have hung my head as Moses told, for the hundredth time, his encounter with God in a burning bush. Or as some other elder recited, once more, the ancient legends of the Garden of Eden, the Tower of Babel, Noah\’s Flood…
I suspect, in fact, that I would have welcomed those old stories even more than new ones. I would not be content to hear only once about Joshua\’s spying expedition along the Jordan. I would have wanted to hear how we escaped from Egypt, even though I knew exactly how it worked out.
In the same way, the early Christian church would have told, over and over, the stories of how Jesus was crucified, and died, and buried, and rose again. About how Paul traveled further on foot than most North Americans have traveled by car or train.
Only in our modern age do we expect every story to be new, and every joke to have a surprise ending.
Storyteller Stuart MacLean gets his biggest laughs from situations that everyone can see coming. “Oh, no, it can\’t be,” his hearers say, stifling their hilarity so that he can continue. And then it can be, and they burst into even louder laughter.
Carol Burnett did same on television, long ago.
Maybe WestJet is on to something, after all.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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