Truthful Tuesday: HAHAHAHAHA…. Oh, Sorry….

Today’s question: Have you ever laughed at an inopportune moment or at a sombre occasion?

I’m sure everyone has at one time or another. My problem is, once I get going, I can’t stop. So, I might start laughing when it’s OK, then not be able to stop when it’s not OK.

On a Friday in Lent, back in my St. Ignatius Grammar School days, we were acting out verbs in English class (this must have been in seventh grade). One of the guys in my class was a master at pratfalls, and the teacher assigned him the verb "drown." He stood in front of the class, held his nose, and fell right over. Needless to say, we all laughed pretty hard about it.

That afternoon, as was usually the case in a Catholic grammar school during Lent, we went to the church for Stations of the Cross toward the end of the day. For those of you not familiar with it, it’s a prayer service where the passion and death of Jesus is told. There are fourteen stations, which are depicted in some manner around the Church (our current parish has fourteen crosses on the wall, spaced around the church; in my parish when we were kids, there were paintings of each station, again spaced around the walls of the church). During the service, the priest and his entourage (one or more altar boys) walk up to each station, they genuflect, the priest announces the station, he reads a meditation out of a book, leads us in a prayer, then moves on to the next station. Anyway, on this particular Friday, they got to the third station, "Jesus falls the first time," and you know what I remembered…

It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud. The strain of having to control myself through the remaining stations, two of which were "Jesus falls the second time" and "Jesus falls the third time," was showing on my face. At the end of the service, one of the nuns came up and asked if I was all right. I said I was, then went out of the church and laughed all the way home…

It wouldn’t have been much better if it wasn’t Lent. Then we would have had Benediction, where we knelt in praise of the Real Presence of Christ (a host, "the consecrated bread or wafer of the Eucharist," placed in a monstrance, a "receptacle in which the host is held and displayed, also called ostensorium" (thank you, Free Dictionary)), and sang ancient hymns, including a translated version of Tantum ergo sacramentum, which started with the line "Down in adoration falling"…