Musings | July 14, 2026
Abe Lincoln told this story when he was confronted by his critics:
Abraham Lincoln
“A frontiersman lost his way in an uninhabited region on a dark and tempestuous night. The rain fell in torrents, accompanied by terrible thunder and more terrific lightning. To increase his trouble his horse halted, being exhausted with fatigue and fright. Presently a bolt of lightning struck a neighboring tree, and the crash brought the man to his knees. He was not an expert in prayer, but his appeal was short and to the point: ‘Oh, good Lord, if it is all the same to you, give us a little more light, and a little less noise.”
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Doesn’t that sound good, in these times? A little more light, a little less noise. Maybe a lot less noise.
In his early days as a trial lawyer, Lincoln told a jury this story about a farm boy: The boy said “Paw, come quick, the hired man and sis are up in the haymow, and he’s a-pullin’ down his pants and she’s a-liftin’ up her skirts and paw they’re gettin’ ready to pee all over our hay!” The father replied: “Son, you’ve got your facts absolutely right, but you’ve drawn a completely wrong conclusion.” Lincoln went on to say the same about his opponent’s speech to the jury: “My learned opponent has his facts absolutely right, but has drawn completely wrong conclusions.” Lincoln won the case.
And isn’t that our story today? There are the facts we read or hear, from reputable sources, that is. And we are tempted to draw catastrophic conclusions from them. But it might just be that our extrapolations from those facts are leading us astray. Perhaps what we’re witnessing in our country today instead are the first stages of a massive course-correction in which people wake up to the disastrous direction to which we’re aimed, and are about to turn 180 degrees as a consequence.
Oh for a reincarnation of old Abe Lincoln! Through all the misery and turmoil of the Civil War, he maintained his sense of humor. His baleful countenance and his gangly body, his inner tendency to melancholy, added comic contradiction to his stories.
He made plenty of fun of himself. At one campaign stop in Ohio he said, “Two friends of mine in Illinois were talking about me. One said, ‘Mr. Lincoln is a self-made man, isn’t he?’ to which the other said, ‘Yes, but I didn’t know that he ever took much pains about it.”
Old Abe went out to the front lines of the Civil War to meet with his generals, and after taking care of business, they’d sit with him as he told stories and they’d howl till their sides were about to split. Lincoln was a natural-born humorist – he would have told crazy stories no matter what – but clearly he knew that in that grim time it was absolutely essential to laugh. Telling jokes was his duty, not just his proclivity. Humor was his spiritual practice.
A practice we will do well to revive in this era of our country’s history. If we let it, the endless barrage of news of the latest depredations and outrages of the current administration can depress us. And that’s intentional. This cabal wants to bury us in bad news so deep that we’ll just go “la la la la” and ignore it, or that we’ll be too exhausted to do anything about it. Obviously you and I as mere individual citizens have limits to what we can do to resist this looming tyranny. But in order to do what we can do, we need to have the spiritual fortitude to do it. And that will definitely require a good sense of humor.
I believe that today, being happy is our civic duty as Americans. The very last thing that our humorless president wants to hear from us is laughter. So let’s cultivate joy. Let’s do what Old Abe did so long ago, and lighten things up with some rowdy story-telling and some earthy but harmless jokes.
This is an era when we need to party heartier than ever, look for the comedy in everyday life, find the ironies in the daily news and joke about them. Not just satire, not just dark humor, but humor that changes the channel completely, taking the oxygen out of expressions of outrage and instead pumping it through the lungs in the form of belly laughs.
We need religion with a sense of humor. We need look no farther than Jesus for inspiration. Like when he met up with some Pharisees who tried to trick him into saying that people should not pay taxes to the Romans. Jesus asked them to give him a coin. They gave him one. He held it up and when he did, no doubt the crowd around him burst into howls of laughter… because it was a denarius, a coin that they only would have used to pay taxes to the Romans! It wasn’t one of the special coins that were used to make offerings at the Jewish temple. Jesus hardly needed to utter his punch line – “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.” He didn’t answer their question on their terms. He didn’t need to insult them. The irony was up in everybody’s face – they brought it on themselves – they answered their own question.
Like Lincoln, Jesus responded to questions not with answers but with stories. Pithy, weird, mysterious parables that stimulated the imagination. His parables were orthogonal interventions – responding to what was going on in the world in an indirect, oblique way that threw people off and got them feeling and thinking differently. Jesus made people happy by telling these peculiar tales.
When we protest against the pointless cruelty of ICE, when we march behind our nation’s flag for women’s rights and trans rights and queer rights, when we march in defense of our threatened democratic institutions, we need to make it fun. We need to project joy: we need to let the forces of tyranny and injustice know that they cannot dampen our spirits. Our protests should be attractive invitations to a movement of happiness. Our joy will model the kind of country we want America to be. By “Making America Happy Again”, now, today, in the midst of all this insanity, we demonstrate the kind of society we want our country to be in the future.
Who wants to be in the kingdom of heaven if it isn’t fun? Let’s invite people into it with laughter. With jokes. With kind and gentle humor. Let it begin with us!
Jim Burklo 2022
The Rev. Jim Burklo
The Rev. Jim Burklo is pastor of United Church of Christ of Simi Valley, Calif. This post is republished from his Substack blog, Musings.