I had just come from my first associate pastorate, which didn't end well, and was a couple of months into my second, and it, too, was all going disastrously wrong. My qualifications didn't leave me fit for much else -- even washing dishes required a certificate, I discovered -- and I had long since run out of money. Just a few years earlier I was fresh out of school, embarking on a degree, and headed for a successful career as a pastor. Now the whole dream had turned sour. I wasn't sleeping, my nightly prayers were becoming shouting matches between me and God (well, okay, the shouting was more or less one-sided), and everything I had expected of life was slipping out of my grip. It was at this low peak in my life that I discovered Woody Allen.

I know a lot of folk don't have much time for the guy. Revelations about his love-life a few years ago were, shall we say, less than savoury. I've spoken to a few people who won't even watch a Woody Allen film for that reason. Fair enough. As for me, however, when I came across Woody Allen, something clicked.

He opens Annie Hall in typical deadpan fashion with a joke about two women in a restaurant in Baltimore. The first woman complains that the food is terrible. "I know," the second woman replies, "and such small portions." Life is terrible, muses Woody, and on top of that, it's simply too short. This kind of irony is a central theme of Woody's films: Life always deals us the worst hand, and yet somehow, despite all that, we still want to live it. He ends the same film with another joke. A man tells a doctor that his brother thinks he is a hen. The doctor asks whether he has considered checking his brother into a mental hospital, to which the reply comes, "I can't. I need the eggs."

I guess it was through Woody I learned to laugh at myself. They say if you don't laugh you'll cry, and it's true. At a time in my life when it seemed that fate had played a very cruel trick on me, the ability to see the ironies of life and to laugh was what kept me sane. It didn't take away the pain and the sadness I felt, but it did help me get through it. On more than one occasion I stood on my deck at night and, looking up at the expanse of stars that seemed to number in the trillions, reflected on this strange juxtaposition of a universe bigger than I could imagine, created by an infinite God, and little, insignificant me and my problems, completely overshadowed by this huge cosmos like a grain of sand out of all the beaches and deserts of the world. (Abraham's picture of the stars in the night sky was an important metaphor in my life at that time.) And I laughed.

There is something deeply ironic about the gospel. It is about a world that tried to crucify its God and, in an ironic twist, fell right into God's plan to save the world. It is about how life came out of death, power out of weakness. It is about the irony of the Lord of the Universe being killed and destroyed by finite men, and yet out of that seed coming the reconciliation and redemption of the whole universe. The gospel tells me that as confused and messed-up a finite creature as me is destined to share the sonship of Jesus Christ. It tells me that somehow, someday, all the pains and tortures of this earthly life aren't even going to be worth remembering compared to what God has in store. It tells me that something that is so big to me now will one day look so utterly trivial.

Knowing the irony doesn't lessen the pain, per se. I can still fear and weep and punch the wall in frustration. It doesn't render life free of hurts. It does mean, however, that even in the darkest moments, even when I am not living and being all I am or should be, my destiny remains unchanged. This hapless, unlucky, foolish, complex, frustrated and vulnerable person I call "Me" is still going one day to be a son of God, sharing in the glory of the Lord of the Universe, living and being with him in all the fullness of the deity. Spot the irony.

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 © Copyright, David L Rattigan 2003