3/27/02
The Spiritual Chicks^SM Get Real!
Comedy and Tragedy

Last week a friend of mine died.  She was a young woman---someone who I knew when she was even younger.  We spent seven or eight summers together as kids in camp and had lost touch for twenty years.  Recent reunion efforts on the part of some of our fellow campers brought us together just as this friend found out she was quite ill.  I’m grateful for the chance to have spoken with her again and to know her briefly as the beautiful and caring adult she grew up to be.  Words like "tragedy" and "why" were heard at her funeral, but there was so much good that she brought to the world.  So what is it that really defines a tragedy?

In junior high English we learned that a tragedy (in the Shakespearean sense, anyway) is a predicament that seems like it might work out, but falls apart in the end.  A comedy, on the other hand, is a situation that gets totally screwed up, but straightens out in the final act.  These definitions stuck with me, but I never knew how to define the end point in real life.  It’s like that old Chinese proverb about the poor man who loses his horse---and with it, his livelihood.  Tragedy!  But wait, the horse comes back with a companion, so now the man has two horses!  Comedy!  Alas, the new horse is difficult to tame and the poor man’s son breaks his leg trying to ride him.  Back to tragedy again---the cycle is endless. 

The only way to break the cycle is to rise above it.  To recognize the indestructible side of ourselves---our spiritual side.  Energy is never created or destroyed, and most mysteries of humankind are eventually revealed through time and study.  So it doesn’t make sense to me that our life force or capacity to understand the world would end with the passing of our bodies.  From this vantage point, life is one big comedy and all that we do out of fear of our own destruction seems as amusing as those wacky actors in tights jumping around on stage protesting their true loves and pretending to be what they’re not out of pride or just plain ignorance.  I honestly believe that my childhood friend is somewhere with a big grin on her face---the same grin she had when we were girls riding in the last row of the camp bus where we could see quite clearly that the pain in one kid’s neck was not "life’s cruel hand," but really just another kid blowing spit balls at him through a straw.

Karen