Open Door

      FOREWORD

       Martin E. Marty

      But I digress. My assigned plot line was very simple: tell potential readers, or actual readers, if there are some, that this book will occasion laughter, enhance their lives, and possibly save their souls, if they have some, and then get out of the way of the author, who has something to say.

      A funny thing happened on the way to the keyboard. I assumed that I would be paid by the word, a foolish delusion. No one ever gets paid for a blurb. Blurbers take it out in trade. They get a copy of the book and a free McDonald's cheeseburger the next time they are in the author's town, which in this case is Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For those who collect town names, Oshkosh is always a winner. We first heard it as children who were not allowed to wear the brand of overalls our farm-kid contemporaries wore. (We were “city-kids,” pop. 2,225, presumably too sophisticated to enjoy the badges of farm life.) Evangelical children, farm or city, were not allowed to wear the prized brand: OshKosh B'gosh. It was explained to us that B'gosh was a corruption of “By God,” which was technically swearing, and we were not allowed to swear or curse or utter vulgarities, few though they be. (This book has a few which are, I have to confess, relevant and thus legitimate and forgivable.)

      But I digress. I have to explain why I am preoccupied with the topic of the book's length. Orders are: insist that Marty keep within a 1,888 word length. I go on like this—almost 300 words already—because the publisher and author stipulate that I dare not transgress by writing a 1,889th word. They evidently fear that a 1,889th word would carry us into Moby Dick-length writing. I bring this up because readers should know that this limit induces tension, a distracting fear that I will go over the proper length.

      I have not yet written why I make so much of this without yet having asserted that this is a good book, not too tasteful but also not too transgressive. I hope it finds a large readership, also among leaders in communities of the sort Willadsen serves: local congregations, since he draws impulse and subjects from them. And they would/should welcome culture-community-church¹ talk, since many oral and written ordinances in such sites are often grim and predictable.

      Since I was at least for one academic quarter a university teacher in a class in which Willadsen was accounted for and presumably present, I have followed his trail. While I read his every column (e.g. in The Cresset, where he is a star), I wanted to be sure I'd pick him out of an alumni/ae crowd, something hard to do because there have been so many students through too many years, and facial hair and other disguises confuse the image a teacher carries in his or her mind. I didn't find him in Wikipedia, or other illustrated references, but his voice and style are unmistakable, vivid, compelling, valid, and valuable. So now I'd like to help readers locate the Willadsen genre, intention, ethos, and, yes, voice. And I will disappoint him and readers if I do not advance this book with reference to an at least quasi-complex reference. This comes from the late Father Hugo Rahner, brother of the last Father Karl Rahner, who bears an awe-provoking name which by the mere fact of it being uttered gives weight, and the implication of profundity, to a text.

      Hugo Rahner, in Man at Play (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967, pp. 9, 27) wrote of a certain personality type, “the grave-merry man” (aneer spoudogeloios—for those of you who need the original; and, while I am within parentheses I should note that Pastor W. and I both know better than to say ‘man’ when we mean ‘human being’ generically, but I am quoting): “Such a man is really always two men in one: he is a man with an easy gaiety of spirit, one might almost say a man of spiritual elegance, a man who feels himself to be living in invincible security; but he is also a man of tragedy, a man of laughter and tears, a man, indeed, of gentle irony, for he sees through the tragically ridiculous masks of the game of life and has taken the measure of the cramping boundaries of our earthly existence.”

      This is the spirit of the kind of human exemplar which Willadsen in effect commends to readers. Some may feel he is too grim and prim to be a humorist of any sort in these days of Comedy Central's television aspiration and too humorous of any sort in these days when pastors are expected to be grim and dim. Except in the chapter in which he cannot resist telling some churchy jokes, his humor reveals itself mainly in the mere telling of events in parish life and the culture that surrounds it. I'd like to think that church members, some sympathetic pagans around them and in their company, and even those clergy who can pass through the eye of a needle into the Kingdom with enough room to spare that they can read this book will become more like the “grave-merry person” Rahner commends to us.

      Let it also be noted that in a spirit of generosity I give back 889 words to the author and publisher who revealed some anxiety that I would go on and force expansion of the book so much that it would have to be re-set and would grow fat and thus cost more, thereby reducing the sales. And that would be a tragedy.

      ¹ Pastor Willadsen is into interfaith-talk, so to be “correct” I should say that “church” can stand for “synagogue,” “mosque,” “coven,” “temple,” and other versions of community. (I am aware that these analogues to “church” also count against the 1,888 word limit, even though they appear in a footnote.)

      ONE

       On the Origin of InterfaithLaughter Night

      Planning my community's annual interfaith Thanksgiving gathering brought me some surprises. My hope was that the event would include a wide variety of religious traditions. In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, variety can be hard to find. eighty percent of Wisconsinites are either Lutheran