Being a Fool for Christ

I have now made it to the biblical three score and ten years.  My seventieth birthday was yesterday.  The biblical lifespan is set at seventy at least in this one reference:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. (Psalm 90:10). 

Given that, I can think of every day being a bonus and a blessing from God which is actually how we should think of every day regardless of our age.  However, that lesson is brought home more dramatically with this milestone.

This date is momentous for another reason.  April 1^st is, o course, April Fools Day which loomed quite large in my past.  People seemed to celebrate April Fools Day to a greater extent during my formative years but I don’t seem to hear as much about big April Fools jokes these days.  Our tenth province, Newfoundland, was supposed to enter confederation on the day of my birth, April 1, 1949.  However, apparently the leader and first premier, Joey Smallwood, changed the date to March 31^st as he didn’t want Newfoundland to be considered the perpetual April Fools joke of Confederation.  That may be more legend than fact.  

I have always been somewhat pleased to be born on April Fools day and have certainly played the fool more than a few times in my life which I won’t elaborate on here.  However, I do take some consolation on another passage from the bible in which being a fool for Christ is honoured, “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.” (1 Cor. 4:10) The Holy Fool has a place of honour in Christianity.  One source notes:

The fool for God's sake was a figure that appeared in both the Muslim and Christian world. Often wearing little to no clothes, this variant of the holy fool would forego all social customs and conventions and feign madness in order to be possessed with their creator's spirit.

I’m quite sure I don’t want to embrace this holiness to that extent but it opens up some interesting possibilities.  Another source seems to capture where I am with this ‘type’:

There is a Fool in all of us. Perhaps it only comes out once a year on our birthday or once a lifetime. For others the way of the fool is a path, a lifestyle – and lucky for them. Given this is April 1st, All Fools’ Day, I want to honor the archetype of the Holy Fool.

The world would definitely be a better place if we were all to take ourselves a bet less seriously.  Our journeys would certainly be more enjoyable. 

Blessings on that journey.