"You Don’t Have to Run Away to Join the Circus"
Message by Rev. Laurie Bushbaum
Jan. 11, 2009
“Damn everything but the circus.” ee cummings
Opening Words: Responsive Reading #437
Reading: excerpt from Learning to Fly, by Sam Keen
“Come to the big top with me.... Unless you become a little child you will never enter the Kingdom of Wonders... Once inside the Tabernacle.... the impossible becomes possible, the profane becomes sacred, and vice versa...
Wild animals are more docile than teenagers. Tigers snarl but obediently sit on their perches and jump through burning hoops... Horses wheel and turn with the precision of Rockettes.
Men and women dance and jump along a high wire, ride a unicycle across an abyss... A cannon fires, but instead of a warhead, a human projectile flies across the arena and lands safely in a net... Clowns in outlandish costumes gleefully shatter the shell of normality, purposely create pandemonium. A miniature car rolls out and contrary to all expectation seventeen people emerge from it...
The whole thing – makes our heads spin. The circus overwhelms us with improbable spectacles. It scrambles our categories... What kind of drama is being enacted in this theatre of incarnate dreams? What kind of sacrament is being celebrated in this church of impossible possibilities?...
Only this is clear, Entering the circus we step back into a world ruled by enchantment – where magic existed before morality, wonder before worship, pleasure before piety, and amazement before practicality.”
Second Reading: excerpt from Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying
and Caring, by Henri J.M. Nouwen
One day, I was sitting with Rodleigh, the leader of the(trapeze) troupe, in his caravan, talking about flying. He said, “As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am the greatest star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him...”
“How does it work?” I asked.
“The secret,” said Rodleigh, “is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything: when I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch and pull me safely over the apron behind the catchbar.”
“You do nothing!” I said, surprised.
“Nothing, “ Rodleigh repeated. “A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.”
When Rodleigh said this with so much conviction, the words of Jesus flashed through my mind: “Father into your hands I commend my Spirit.” Dying is trusting in the catcher... Don’t be afraid... Just stretch out your arms and hands and trust, trust, trust.
________
My father took me to the circus when I was about 6. With seven kids in the family, we didn’t very often go out to special events, so the trip to the circus was important. I remember the smell of the sawdust on the floor. I remember the crowds. I didn’t like the clowns because they made fun of people and I didn’t think that they were funny. I felt sorry for the lion because the lion tamer had a very scary whip and I was pretty sure that the lion would much rather be free than in his cage. I loved the beautiful horses and riders. They moved as one as the acrobats did amazing tricks in their pretty costumes. I loved the trapeze, the build up and excitement as the flyer let go, literally sailing through the air and grabbed by the catcher. It all seemed so simple yet utterly impossible to me. Best of all, I loved the caramel apple my Dad bought for me. All in all, I left the circus disappointed. It was not what I had hoped for. I sensed unhappiness underneath the glitz; I worried about the animals. It seemed very contrived.
I didn’t see a circus again until my family saw Cirque Du Soleil, the French Canadian human -only circus.... After we saw that my kids talked, incessantly about wanting to be in the circus when they grew up. Luckily for them, they didn’t have to wait. St. Paul has one of the few, real circus
training programs for children and youth in the U.S. They can do everything from juggling and unicycle riding ( or both together) to contortion and flying trapeze.
Wednesdays were circus days at our house. After the kids came home from school, had something to eat and changed their clothes, we hopped in the car and drove to the youth circus training center. A real big-top. Permanently rigged for high wire walking and anything else you could think of.
But looking through some old journals of mine I recently came across these words that I wrote when the kids were younger. “What a day. Michael went to work early and while I was trying to get the kids off to school and pre-school one cat peed on the stairs and the other threw up on
the kitchen floor. While cleaning the mess and trying to find boots, coats, hats and mittens for all of us, I was called by Planned Parenthood in need of a chaplain for a 15 year old who is pregnant and afraid she is going to hell. And that was all by 9:00 a.m.”
It has since occurred to me that one didn’t have to run away to join the circus. We are the circus. I know that I have played a stunning variety of roles in my own Circus. I have been brave and daring. Sometimes I have felt like the freak, the outsider. On occasion I have tamed my own wildness. I have rightly and wrongly tried to tame the wildness in others.
Much of my life I worked very hard to be taken seriously. But my friend Laura, a budding young actress moved from Minneapolis to San Francisco to attend the circus conservatory there. She thought perhaps she wanted to be a clown. In one of her letters she wrote, “Because clown humor is all about human fallibility, and not about cleverness, accessing it (clown humor) is truly very hard, very scary – hence, the abundance of bad clowns in the world. In the words of my clown teacher... most very funny clowning is about being, not clever, but ‘truly, deeply, stupid.’ Because it is scary to stop trying to be smart, and clever, and funny, and to instead let oneself be sincerely stupid, or just human.”
O.K. I am old enough and secure enough now to recognize that I am a clown. I know this because the other day, I looked and looked for my glasses. I checked beside the bed where I used them the night before. I checked my purse, my coat pockets. I checked the kitchen counter and the
kitchen desk. I checked the mantel above the fireplace and the bench in the entryway. And do you know where I found them? Yessiree, right around my neck. Tell me, does it get any more stupid than that? Sure, I could explain that I was still getting used to having them on a cord and that my glasses were in the way as I unloaded the dishwasher that morning so I pushed them back. They were kind of tight against my throat and not dangling in front where I can’t forget about them. But really!
And do I also need to tell you that I have desperately looked for my keys all over the house, so as not to be late for a meeting, finally offering my kids a reward if they will help me find them quickly. One of the kids wins by looking me in the eye, straight-faced and asking, “Are they in your pocket?” Bingo. The clown smiles, and kisses the smirking 12 year old and runs out of the house.
I am a clown; no doubt about it. I have done truly, deeply, stupid things. I have spent days feeding a baby bird from an eye-dropper and then wept huge tears of delight when the bird pulled through and flew right out of my hand and to the top of a tree. I have done the really hard tasks, and then utterly tripped on the easy ones. For example, I have led a tense, emotional memorial service with nearly a thousand people present, including hundreds of raw and grieving teenagers whose 16 year old friend was killed by a car while riding his skateboard. One of the hardest pastoral challenges I have faced. I was proud of the work I did. And then later that month, I twice, not once, but twice, flaked out and forget to meet an important committee chair for an early morning coffee appointment.
I’m a clown. And here’s the Good News: so are you. Granted, we are not supposed to tell other people they are clowns; it is better if they figure it out for themselves. But I’m pulling Pastoral Privilege this morning and letting you all know, that you are, in fact, clowns. Welcome to the training camp. Today we will practice putting our feet in our mouths, or having the rug pulled out from underneath us and falling flat on our faces. Today we will practice loving and caring for the tiny blade of grass even as the steam roller comes right behind us. Today we will pray for peace even though it may never, finally, ultimately reign. We do this because we are clowns. It’s not so bad being a clown. We are generally among good company. We can generate deep, full belly laughs without a slapstick DVD in sight. And we can believe in and work for that which the dominant culture labels hopeless or ridiculous. All in the name of practicing balance. We balance our graciousness with our moments of crassness. We balance our brilliance with our dim-witted myopia. We balance our fears with our moments of courage. And our many mistakes with a wise choice that took every ounce of self-discipline to do right.
We are living in the Circus. And I’m guessing that as each one of us can recognize the clown we are, we can also recognize the flying trapeze artist, too. Have you ever wanted to get from here to there and wondered how to cross the abyss? Have you stood immobilized by fear but knowing that somehow you had no choice but to take the fist step? Have you ever been compelled to reach for the stars, to push beyond old limits? Of course you have. And that makes you a trapeze artist.
Did you know that it takes months in basic trapeze training just to learn to fall into the net without breaking your neck? And that for every trick there is also a correct way to fall if you mess it up. Theologian Sam Keen, who took up the trapeze at age 62, realized that taking up the trapeze was not just about learning to fly, it was all about learning how to live.
The trapeze is teaching him countless life lessons. One of them is that we have to “balance strength with strength.” He discovered that as he was learning to swing on the trapeze he was developing terrific muscles in his forearms. But other muscles were screaming. Keen discovered that in order to be a trapeze artist he was going to have strengthen his entire body. With a typically male body, he had a moderate amount of basic strength, but he had no flexibility. Guess what? Flying on the trapeze takes strength in more places than Keen thought, and it takes incredible flexibility and fluidity. His body was going to have to learn to balance strength with strength.
I think I know what he means. As a person, my dominant cluster of strengths are kinesthetic, intuitive, and artistic. Technological savyy is NOT high on my ratings. And because I have a computer geek in the family, I can always holler downstairs for the resident techie to come and solve all my computer challenges. If truth be told, I can be turned into a puddle of tears pretty quickly by my sleek, innocent- looking ibook. But over the winter holidays I got tired of waiting for my husband to be available to help me with a photo project, so I took it on myself. With just the tiniest bit of help, I learned how to manage all our digital photos. Move them around into
cleverly named “albums.” How to create photo books of different sizes, shapes, with any number of pages, with or without words. I can choose cool.
Fonts, snappy borders and gazillions of background colors and patterns. Mix and match it, order it and have this very snazzy looking book in my mailbox in 5 days. No doubt, some of you could do this in your sleep. That’s not the point. The question is, if you want to fly, what strength do you need to develop to get from here to there?
Keen describes how the trapeze taught him to learn when to hold on to the trapeze bar and when to let go and reach for the catcher. It also taught him that there are times in life when holding on does not help at all. He describes a time when he was trying to master a new trick, trying it over and over with the same unsuccessful results. He finally decided he had to walk away from the trapeze; he had to go home, do something else. Interestingly enough that night he dreamed himself doing the trick perfectly. In the morning, he went to practice and nailed the trick the first time. It is difficult to work hard, to turn our will and our energy toward a goal. And not succeed.
Keen wrote, “It should be clear... that there are many things that cannot be accomplished by willpower... We fall into great physical and spiritual danger when we attempt to govern our lives by the single ideal of power. Continuous effort exhausts both the body and spirit.... There is a time for conquest and a time for yielding. You have to know when to swim upstream and when to float with the current... Once I accept my limitations, however, amazing things happen.” Sam Keen sums up his years of experience as an amateur trapeze artist with this: “The goal of human life is for the soul to recover its wings.” And recovering our wings requires that we learn the lessons of dynamic balance.
About the circus Keen said, “The whole thing – makes our heads spin. The circus overwhelms us with improbable spectacles. It scrambles our categories... What kind of drama is being enacted in this theatre of incarnate dreams? What kind of sacrament is being celebrated in this church of impossible possibilities?...
The answer is Life; we are in the great Circus called Life. We play each part: the lion as well as the lion tamer; the acrobat on the horse and the prancing horse, the explosive cannon and the clown that goes flying to the net. And yes, we are the net, too. We are each part and each part plays us. We are the players in the drama as well the ticket holders in the stands.
Life, like the circus is messy, smelly, glorious, crude and enchanting.
Like us. And the circus , like life, ends. All the way through the show we know it will end. Which is why I wanted to share with you the thoughts of Henri Nouwen. He had a lifelong passion for the circus. On one of his sabbaticals in the early 1990’s he spent a year traveling with a European circus and studying with The Flying Rodleighs, a famous trapeze group. He trusted that they had something to teach him about the spiritual life. As Nouwen was dying he wrote the reflection I read at the beginning of the service, which I offer again:
One day, I was sitting with Rodleigh, the leader of the troupe, in his caravan, talking about flying. He said, “As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am the greatest star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him in the long jump”.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“The secret,” said Rodleigh, “is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything: when I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch and pull me safely over the apron behind the catchbar.”
“You do nothing!” I said, surprised.
“Nothing, “ Rodleigh repeated. “A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him.”
When Rodleigh said this with so much conviction, the words of Jesus flashed through my mind: “Father into your hands I commend my Spirit.” Dying is trusting in the catcher... Don’t be afraid... Just stretch out your arms and hands and trust, trust, trust.
The circus contains it all: our imagination and our stupidity, our courage and our cruelty; our beauty and our grotesqueness, our smallness and our ability to soar. We don’t know what happens when we are grasped and pulled behind the final curtain. We know that the show goes on and we have left some of our tricks behind and we have been a part of the greatest show on earth. Not bad for a bunch of clowns. But until then, we can practice remembering that we are always held by the Spirit of Life.
All Souls Church — PO Box 400 — Sioux Falls, SD 57101
605-338-8652 — www.sfuu.org
Return to top of this page.
Return to index of sermon topics. |
HOME