Can you laugh and pray at the same time? Absolutely.

A much younger me would not have admitted that I sometimes laugh during prayer.  Prayer is serious!  Yes, prayer is serious, and it is seriously good to have a regular habit of prayer.  But that doesn’t make it incongruous with laughter. 

This is important to remember for anyone called to family life because family prayer isn’t always as quiet and orderly as monastic prayer.  I laughed when I misread the word “us” as “me” in a prayer, and one of my kids muttered “selfish” under his breath.  I laughed reading the Bible when I came to a reference to a tree planted by the water because one of my kids once asked how water could plant a tree.     

My son recently came home from school with a stack of sticky notes he’d stuck together on alternating sides that fanned out accordion style.  He even used glue to reinforce his spontaneous creation.  I was skeptical when he tried to convince me the time he spent doing that was not a waste of time.  But then I laughed over and over when he spent the rest of the evening entertaining the entire family with “magic” tricks that were all basically the same trick of the notes not falling apart when he fanned them out or pretended to shoot them from his hand.  The kid has a flare for comedy, and he wasn’t wrong when he said he hadn’t wasted his time.  (The Aeneid did eventually get annotated.)

The next time I prayed the rosary, images of my child yelling, “Sticky note power!” kept popping into my head.  I didn’t get through a single decade with a straight face.  And here’s why this wasn’t bad.  God wants us to share everything with him.  He wants us to bring our pain, our struggles, even our anger.  But he also wants us to bring our silliness, our joy, and our fun.  That super weird fantasy you had about showing up at a skate park and doing tricks no old person can do?  You can take that to God, too.  It’s not like he doesn’t already know.  God knows I have funny kids.  If I’m still laughing at something one of them did when I’m talking to him, he gets it.  Nothing makes parents happier than hearing our children laugh.