God’s jokes

“God’s jokes” is Marie-Josèphe de la Croix’s wry expression for a discomfort she must endure herself, not an abstract lesson in divine power. A chafing towel prompts her to test the phrase against the theology she was taught: if God is omnipotent and immortal, she reasons, it is sad that He should possess no sense of humor.

The Expression in Context

As Marie-Josèphe moves through crowds of visitors, a rolled-up towel chafes her legs. She wonders whether she can remove the nuisance until the next day and calls it “Another of God’s jokes, at which you can laugh only if you aren’t the subject.” The qualification makes the humor depend on who bears the discomfort: from a distance, it may look like a joke; for its subject, it is simply unpleasant.

Her thought recalls an earlier exchange at the convent, where her confessor was shocked when she asked about God’s jokes. He taught that “God performed miracles, and He meted out punishment — such as women’s monthlies — but He did not play jokes.” His distinction makes bodily suffering legible as punishment, while excluding the possibility that it could be comic. The towel’s chafing gives Marie-Josèphe a personal, immediate counterpoint to that settled explanation.

Theological Reversal

Marie-Josèphe turns the logic of divine authority around. Rather than accept that God’s power and punishment make the discomfort meaningful, she imagines what it would mean to be “omnipotent” and “immortal” without a sense of humor. The thought does not deny God’s power; it makes that power seem emotionally incomplete. Her joke is directed less at suffering itself than at a theology that can explain pain as punishment but cannot admit the levity of seeing it from the sufferer’s side.

Narrative Function

The expression arises during an ordinary bodily inconvenience, but the scene does not linger there. When shouting and a crowd gather around the sea monster’s tent, Marie-Josèphe hurries toward it, afraid that something has happened to the creature. That abrupt shift from private discomfort to concern for another being places her comic irreverence within a larger portrait of her attention: she can make light of her own nuisance, yet responds urgently to the possibility of harm to the captive sea monster.