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A Better Motto Than Live, Laugh, Love

ByLara d’Entremont

On Humility, Wonder, and Levity

It was a cotton-candy sky that morning at the bus stop. I looked overhead at the swirls of bubblegum pink and baby blue in the sky and casually pointed it out to my boys.

“Oh, Mommy!” one of the twins cried out. “Take a picture of it!”

I laughed. “Why? There will be other cotton candy skies. It’s nothing special.”

“Oh, please Mommy,” he said. “I want to draw it when I get home. I want to remember it.” He could hardly take his eyes from it even when the bus came.

My boys find joy, awe, and excitement in the simplest of places. They are content to carve a cardboard box for hours. They make rivers in the sand with the hose, rocks, and sticks. They amass stone and shell collections that hold their attention long after they’ve been brought home. They spook moth after moth just to watch them fly away and disappear into the sky. They’re filled to the brim with wonder.

Yet something happens as we grow. We become less enchanted, don’t we? It’s part of becoming grown-up. We see it begin even in the early years of childhood—the kid who walks with his head high through the playground declaring, “Santa isn’t real; only babies believe in Santa.” Children pride themselves in knowing more than their younger peers and putting away childish things like stories, dolls, picturebooks, and cartoons. It’s cool to be all grown-up.

Then we become grown-ups and suddenly we wish for that wonder and levity again. The news doesn’t help; it’s like the world is burning before our very eyes, that we’re headed for either the apocalyptic worlds of The Road or 1984 or maybe even The Machine Stops. The other night I wept through tears to a loved one, “Is there any good left? Anything truly, unspoiled good? And is there any reason to seek after good knowing how easily it could be taken away?”

Is it possible to re-enchant ourselves when we know this world for what it is? When we know there is no Narnia on the other side of the wardrobe, no island where the Wild Things are, no fairy collecting all our teeth to build her castle?

I want to believe there is. But it will take some work to get there.

The Role of Humility

G. K. Chesterton says that this kind of wonder requires humility. Pride, being high and lifted up, looks at everything from above, as if from a plane or air balloon or space ship (or like the kid who now knows the Easter Bunny also isn’t real). Being so high up is a magnificent way to view the world—but Chesterton reminds us that you’re not really seeing anything once you’re so far away from it; it’s all dots and fragments. Humility brings us low enough that we can finally see the details. “Looking down on things may be a delightful experience,” he wrote, “only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed.1” He misses the particular, the peculiar, the specifically delightful. Chesterton went on:

Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are—of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens . . . These are the visions of him who, like the child in the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance . . . But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are—the gigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey of strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of dust like the wreck of temples, and thistledown like the ruin of stars—all this colossal vision shall perish with the last of the humble.2

To be filled with wonder, we must first be humble creatures who believe it worth our time to bend low to examine this world, to get into the grit of it, and see it for what it truly is. We don’t believe ourselves to be too old, too good, too sophisticated to see and examine. It’s like the child who gets on his hands and knees to examine yet another ladybug, pick up another rock, because each one is unique and worth his attention. We remove our pride and fears of getting dirty or ruffling up our collars and bend low to consider what truly stands before us. We need to get low to be able to appreciate and wonder at the things of this world, even the small things—like a cotton candy sky worth remembering.

On the Fence, Winslow Homer

But as Chesterton hinted at here, wonder also requires us to think in terms of nonsense. “So long as we regard a tree as an obvious thing, naturally and reasonably created for a giraffe to eat, we cannot properly wonder at it. It is when we consider it as a prodigious wave of the living soil sprawling up to the skies for no reason in particular that we take off our hats.”3

This is the difference between the adult who stands on the beach staring out at the endless waves with a shrug and the child who cannot believe that the ocean goes on forever. The humble person is not only unafraid to get down on their hands and knees but also throws off their sophistication and sees this world for the nonsense it is. Nothing is boring or mundane to them, but a ridiculous miracle that should even exist and be what it is. It’s a miracle to them that the sky, which is usually so blue or grey, is suddenly streaked with the same bubbly pink they find in their crayon box.

This is the natural disposition of children, is it not? This is what Christ meant when he called us to be like children. He did not mean a lack of maturity, a lack of knowledge, or lack of responsibility. It is not a call to throw off all effort and just sit idly by waiting for him to spoon feed us every need and desire. He meant for us to have eyes of wonder and nonsense, ready to seize this world for all the wonder it has even amid its brokenness.

Like a Child

Whenever I think of childlikeness, I can’t help but think of Lucy Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia. While everyone else is busy trying to act “grown-up” (as Lucy often accuses them) and thinking overly practical, Lucy has eyes to see Aslan before anyone else. She’s the one who can first pass through the wardrobe, she is the one who faithfully waits on Aslan in every hardship, and she is the one who always believes in his return or coming to their rescue. She has eyes to see; she has the wonder, despite all the reasons to be jaded by this world, despite everyone debunking her, to believe with all her heart Aslan will be there and it is worth waiting on. The others at times consider her words and ideas to be utter nonsense, but Lucy is not afraid of that. She’s not too prideful to believe nonsense.

Chesterton declared that nonsense is faith. “The well-meaning person who, by merely studying the logical side of things, has decided that ‘faith is nonsense,’ does not know how truly he speaks; later it may come back to him in the form that nonsense is faith.”4 Lewis similarly said that while faith may call the uneducated to enlightenment, it calls “a twentieth-century academic prig like me and tells me to go fasting to a Mystery, to drink the blood of the Lord.” He went on,

I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result when you go away from the debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar. That is why we apologists take our lives in our hands and can be saved only by falling back continually from the web of our own arguments, as from our intellectual counters, into the reality—from Christian apologetics into Christ Himself.5

There’s the rub: While everyone else is thinking practically about the idea of Aslan, Lucy, in her childlikeness, is seeing Aslan himself and pursuing him. We think we’ve reached the depths of maturity when we become so serious, stoic, studious, and staunch about our faith, meanwhile we’ve forgotten the earthy, wondrous, and downright nonsensical mystery that is our faith. We want to act grown-up without having been children first. And in this we sink into pride. In this, we lose wonder and become jaded. Because hope is often nonsense, and we have no time for such ridiculousness.

As we put on this kind of humility, the kind that can consider and look at the world and faith as nonsense and be okay with it, the kind that reduces us small enough to see the wondrous details of everything around us, we need laughter. Humility, wonder, and laughter are intricately connected.

Laughing at Ourselves

Chesterton said that the beauty of the human skeleton is that it keeps us humble because of how absurd we (no matter who we are) look underneath whatever kind of beauty we think we have. “However much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones of my skull beneath it are laughing for ever.”6 Underneath all our seriousness, we’re all smiling skeletons. We’re all people who do embarrassing acts such as stumbling, stuttering, or sputtering, and no amount of vanity will ever change that.

In an essay for Comment, Elizabeth Stice writes that “laughter can be a kind of spiritual litmus test, a formative tool that both cuts and illumines. And the most stringent test is not so much being able to make a joke—or resist making one—as it is to be the subject of one. To patiently and humbly endure being laughed at, even derisively, can be a sign of spiritual maturity that points to the wisdom of the cross.”7

Children also know how to laugh. It comes almost as naturally as their instinct to smack and root for the breast. We’re laughing at the same funny faces and antics before we ever exchange words or wave at one another. Children laugh with others and at themselves. What should be embarrassing for my children they find hilarious. This kind of humility, to laugh at themselves, seems so natural; they laugh long before they can talk. Yet embarrassment is learned from us self-conscious adults.

Lewis wrote in The Silver Chair, “It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”8 Many of us have become quite grown-up, haven’t we? We debunk everything. We believe in nothing. We are so jaded that hope is a sarcastic joke. We have no patience for the child who wants to examine the millionth dandelion. We think stories are for babies. We must move on to better things.

But what if we didn’t? What if we had the humility and levity that creates wonder in us, like we once had as children? Maybe we could find what light, beauty, and goodness remain in this dark world.

  1. G. K. Chesterton, “The Defendant,” Project Gutenberg, 1901, accessed March 21, 2026, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12245/12245-h/12245-h.htm#A_DEFENCE_OF_SKELETONS. ↩︎
  2. Chesterton, “The Defendant.” ↩︎
  3. Chesterton, “The Defendant.” ↩︎
  4. Chesterton, “The Defendant.” ↩︎
  5. C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Docks, ed. Walter Hooper (1970; repr., Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States of America: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014), 103. ↩︎
  6. Chesterton, “The Defendant.” ↩︎
  7. Elizabeth Stice, “Laugh It Off: Bearing ridicule well points to the wisdom of the cross,” Comment, February 26, 2026, accessed March 6, 2026, https://comment.org/laugh-it-off/. ↩︎
  8. C. S. Lewis, “The Silver Chair,” in The Chronicles of Narnia (1951; repr., New York, New York, United States of America: Harper Collins, 2001), 661. ↩︎

Lara d’Entremont
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