October 2025
“Glad Tears at Last”: the grace of laughter in the thought of Frederick Buechner
There is a joke in Frederick Buechner’s 1993 theological dictionary Wishful Thinking. Under the entry for “Laughter,” Buechner simply includes two cross references: ‘(See Faith, Atheist).’[1] The puzzled reader might wonder what to make of this seemingly self-negating definition of laughter. Yet, in typical paradoxical fashion, Buechner means both extremes — laughter is a sign of faith even as it suggests a reasonable response to any empty cosmos. More tellingly, Buechner suggests not just a range of possible meanings but also their interconnection. In the masterful novel Godric (1980), the narrator introduces Godric’s mother Aedwen as covering her mouth both at moments of mirthful laughter and profound weeping, such that
…you’d never be sure which she hid with her hand, her tears or her cackling. I think there were times she herself didn’t know, nor does anyone know at times. Laugh till you weep. Weep till there’s nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it’s all one.[2]
Both weeping and laughter arise from the same origin, and the catharsis each provides then exhausts the person until one emotional reality has been transformed to the other, two ends of one ultimately unified experience.
However, this interconnection between weeping and laughing does not fully explain the promise of grace, for Aedwen could vacillate between tears and humor, chaotically ricocheting between poles without satisfying resolution. In his little book Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (1977), Buechner suggests a final and ultimate transformation of all tears into laughter in a final consummation of grace, which he describes as ‘glad tears at last, not sad tears, tears at the hilarious unexpectedness of things rather than at their tragic expectedness.’[3] For Buechner, the incursion of grace into a life brings ‘hilarious unexpectedness’ to the trap of our tragic solipsism, and the tears of our misery are transformed into the stunned, glad tears of a potential future where life is not one damned thing after another.
The second cross-reference in Wishful Thinking shows how laughter can become a cynical acceptance of our own trapped state within the tragedy of sin. In an extended explanation for the entry ‘Atheist’, Buechner writes,
The laughter of faith in no-God is heard in Sartre’s story “The Wall”: a man is threatened with death if he doesn’t betray the whereabouts of his friend to the enemy. The man refuses to do this and sends the enemy on a wild goose chase to a place where he knows his friend isn’t. By chance it turns out to be the very place where his friend is. The friend is captured and executed and the man given his freedom. Sartre ends the story by saying that the man laughed until he cried.[4]
The cynical laughter of faith in no-God contrasts with the laughter of faith epitomized in the story of Sarah responding to the promise of Isaac, alluded to in the first cross-reference, yet the Sartre example reveals the self-destroying absurdity of a world without meaning or design. The man who has unintentionally betrayed his friend has no choice but to laugh at the tragedy of a world inclined toward destruction, but that tragedy becomes an ache for a better world when the laughter runs out, a hunger that would be a delusion if, in fact, there is no-God.
Buechner’s understanding of man’s state follows the Christian tradition, begun by St. Augustine and developed in the writing of Martin Luther, of describing the state of sin as incurvatus in se. That curved-in-on-self quality of sin creates a black hole, a solipsism of self where each person feels the weight of his or her own insufficiency. Crying out in pain, finite sinners can only bemoan their sorrowful state without being able to will something else. The sinful man trapped in the tragedy of his own self frantically works to construct an image that covers over the nakedness of his sinful state. In Telling the Truth, Buechner recounts a moment in teaching Shakespeare’s King Lear when students grappled with the fact of their own tragic sinfulness. In response to Lear’s speech in Act III, Scene 4, the students recognize they are ‘[t]he poor naked wretches of the world […] all of them, everybody. They did not know it before, but they know it now because they have heard it spoken.’[5] The spoken fact of their nakedness and wretched position within the cosmos becomes apparent in Lear’s moment of clarity and blessing, and the students are drawn out of their curved-in state and brought into the light of the truth about their own fallenness. They ‘suffer the sadness of it’ and ‘tremble at the beauty of it, which may make some fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats.’[6] This revelation of their state will demand that these students make choices that lean further into the solipsism or fight against such loneliness and reach out in blessing toward others who share their nakedness.
The second option attempts to heal the loneliness of the curved-inward state of tragic sinfulness. In imitation of the cry of dereliction from the Cross, Buechner writes that this desire to heal from loneliness is a prayer that asks,
My God, where the Hell are you, meaning If thou art our Father who art in Heaven, be thou also our Father who art in Hell because Hell is where the action is, where I am and the cross is. It is where the pitiless storm is. It is where men labor and are heavy laden under the burden of their own lives without you.[7]
Crying to God to join suffering man in the depths of Hell reveals a desire for intimacy with the God who already entered into this state and showed us that even the most sinful person is not so isolated that he or she can’t meet God in those depths. To confront the seeming isolation of our darkest curvature inwards is to find God already waiting for us there.
This fact that there is neither height nor depth that can separate even the tragically alone from the love of God introduces the possibility that our isolation in sin can be overcome in the twinkling of an eye when the promise of God becomes real in time and eternity. The first of Buechner’s cross-references for laughter mentions the story of faith contained in Sarah’s laughter at the promise of a child in her old age, a promise so startling that it takes Sarah’s breath away. Buechner reminds us,
Faith is ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,’ says the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:1). Faith is laughter at the promise of a child called laughter. If someone had come up to Jesus when he was on the cross and asked him if it hurt, he might have answered, like the old man in the joke, ‘Only when I laugh.’ But he wouldn’t have been joking. Faith dies, as it lives, laughing.[8]
Tucked between the doctrinal claim that faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the possibility of Jesus Himself laughing through His assurance in the eventual defeat of His Passion’s suffering, Sarah’s laughter receives the child with a joke of a name that showed how little she believed that God would live up to His promise to her husband. When Buechner returns to the image of Sarah and Abraham’s laughter at God’s pledge, he notes that the laughter comes from their self-awareness that only a fool would believe this promise, yet they are these fools, and ‘[t]hey are laughing because laughing is better than crying and maybe not even all that different.’[9] Again, Buechner shows the interconnection between those dry and empty years when Sarah and Abraham are caught up in the aching loneliness of a childless marriage that longs for more and the sudden possibility that the very desires of their hearts would be fulfilled long past the point of reasonable likelihood.
However, the possibility of God’s promises being fulfilled does more than provide a late-in-life consolation. Working wonders, God’s gift of Isaac to them reverses their former isolation, drawing them into a covenantal community with the Lord Himself and a family with each other. Buechner writes that their laughter
…comes from as deep a place as tears come from, and in a way it comes from the same place. As much as tears do, it comes out of the darkness of the world where God is of all missing persons the most missed, except that it comes not as an ally of darkness but as its adversary, not as a symptom of darkness but as its antidote.[10]
The fulfillment of this promise doesn’t just build a community with God, but this community now has the power to redeem the loneliness of this darkness with the promise of the covenant — that God’s word to them will abide through future generations and will create a whole people that will save these childless retirees from the dustbin of history and the depths of Hell.
Put simply, Buechner reveals how Abraham and Sarah accept the joke of their failure — the variety of their plans initiated in light of what they saw as the inevitable failure of God to live up to His promise — now being defeated in the ‘unforeseeable’ intervention of grace to them.[11] To name a child after the failure of your expectations is to accept their naked wretchedness with a sense of humor. Buechner argues, ‘People are prepared for everything except for the fact that beyond the darkness of their blindness there is a great light.’[12] Like Lear and the students in Buechner’s discussion of tragedy’s move towards a community that would save the tragic figure from himself, Sarah and Abraham reach out with joy and laughter; unlike the tragic, however, they rest assured that there is light just beyond their reach, waiting to receive them for the faith of believing the unlikely and improbable. In Buechner’s novel-length consideration of the laughter of the patriarchs, appropriately named Son of Laughter (1993), Jacob describes the faith of his grandparents in deeply interpersonal terms:
The Fear comes when he comes. It is the Fear who summons. The gods give in return for your gifts to them: the strangled dove, the burnt ox, the first fruit. […] In return it is only the heart’s trust that the Fear asks. Trust him though you cannot see him and he has no silver hand to hold. Trust him though you have no name to call by, though out of the black night he leaps like a stranger to cripple and bless.[13]
Retaining the natural trembling of God who exists in mysterium tremendum, Jacob names God as a Fear who desires trust from those to whom He has made a promise, foreshadowing his own teasing renaming as Israel after wrestling with God and being crippled through that interaction, thereby becoming who the Fear calls him to be. First Sarah’s, then Abraham’s, and now Jacob’s laughter at the unexpected grace of God showing up to transform a life contrasts with the laughter of the atheist who laughs until he cries at the absurdity of his own life; instead, these figures cry until they laugh, staking out their faith in the future fulfillment of the promises made by this Fear.
Buechner ends his chapter on the Gospel as comedy by inviting his readers to consider themselves through the lens of the graciousness of a laughter that frees human beings from their own trapped selves. He writes,
[S]een from the outside, seen as God sees it and as occasionally by the grace of God man also sees it, I suspect that it is really the other way around. From the divine perspective, I suspect that it is seen as not inevitable whereas it is the comic that is bound to happen. The comedy of God’s saving the most unlikely people when they least except it, the joke in which God laughs with man and man with God—I believe that this is what is inevitable.[14]
Belief in the inevitable offer of salvation extended to the least likely people rejoices in the utterly boundless nature of a world created as pure gift for all. These brief moments when we have eyes to see receive the grace offered by God. He shares His view of the world where those poor naked wretches are worthy of dying and living for. In such a grand act of love, the predestined comic resolution to a world breaks through that world’s tragic isolation and awaits the moment where the bride will be caught up in the glory of Her Bridegroom returning for Her and their eternal wedding feast. Being assured of such a joyful conclusion to time itself reveals the trap of our own tragic turn inward and gives us a way of imagining when those tears of sadness will be wiped away by being transformed into glad tears at last.
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Works cited:
[1] Fredrick Buechner. Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (San Franscisco, CA: Harper One, 1993), p.61.
[2] Frederick Buechner, Godric (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1980), p.11.
[3] Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale (San Francisco, CA: Harper One, 1977), p.61.
[4] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p.4-5.
[5] Buechner, Telling the Truth, p.30.
[6] Ibid., p.36.
[7] Ibid., p.39.
[8] Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p.29-30.
[9] Buechner, Telling the Truth, p.50.
[10] Ibid., p.56.
[11] Ibid., p.57.
[12] Ibid., p.70.
[13] Frederick Buechner, Son of Laughter (San Francisco, CA: Harper One, 1993), p.184.
[14] Buechner, Telling the Truth, p.72.
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