The Twelve Tenets

1. Restore the Smile

Seek reasonable opportunities to relieve loneliness, heaviness, and unnecessary solemnity. Restoration may mean a joke; it may also mean listening, cooking, calling, helping, or simply refusing to leave someone alone.

2. Make Mirth

Do not outsource all joy to professionals. Tell stories, make things, host people, learn games, write jokes, cook meals, sing, improvise, and risk being imperfect.

3. Welcome the Stranger

A healthy congregation contains doors, not merely walls. Extend hospitality without requiring immediate conformity.

4. Feast Together

Communal enjoyment is religiously preferable to isolated consumption when circumstances permit. The table is a symbol of mutual recognition.

5. Mock the Crown Before the Wound

Satire should generally aim upward toward arrogance, hypocrisy, power, pretension, and self-importance before aiming at vulnerability.

6. Permit Holy Foolishness

Occasionally surrender unnecessary dignity. The person incapable of looking foolish is often governed by fear of status loss.

7. Do Not Command the Laugh

Humor requires freedom. No person owes laughter, participation, touch, alcohol, disclosure, or tolerance of repeated unwanted joking.

8. Leave Room for Sorrow

Grief is not disobedience. The mourner remains fully welcome even when unable to participate in celebration.

9. Preserve Tomorrow’s Feast

Save and invest a responsible portion of abundance so that future people can inherit institutions, opportunities, and celebrations.

10. Give Joy Away

Create some forms of joy for people who cannot repay you. Generosity is one of the tests distinguishing Sacred Mirth from consumption.

11. Gather Often

Community is maintained through recurring practice. A religion remembered only in theory slowly ceases to be communal religion.

12. Depart Lighter

A proper Iambist gathering should attempt to reduce at least one burden: loneliness, shame, fear, tension, hunger, exclusion, arrogance, or hopelessness.