Send in the Clowns: Theology for the Imaginative and Vulnerable

"Detail from Marc Chagall's Four Seasons Mosaic in Chicago's Exelon Plaza" by UGArdener is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Send in the Clowns

Theology for the Imaginative and Vulnerable

Clowns walk on stilts, revealing the precarious side of life. They remind us that all things are contingent, that all things could be otherwise. This is what Whitehead calls the ontological principle. It is the idea that the very being of an entity -- the essence of actuality -- is an act of cutting off certain possibilities in the moment and actualizing others. Nothing has to be as it is, as if preordained by a cosmic blueprint. Life is fragile.

Sometimes catastrophes occur. Often clowns are enacting catastrophes with a lower case "c" so that we can cope with catastrophes of a larger order: violence, climate change, death, and disaster. Amid all of this clowns are vulnerable and beautiful, with faces both happy and sad.

When things are too ordered they create eddies of chaos which destabilize predictable habits of thought; and when things are too chaotic they offer pockets of order -- often in the form of humor -- which provide consolation for troubled souls. Clowns are smart, too. They outmaneuver their assailants, not by killing them, but by discovering novel possibilities for escape. Sometimes they even return, offering bouquets of flowers for reconciliation, thus overcoming the law of retribution with the freshness of grace. They are all about relational power.

As they juggle their many balls, they are playful but serious, reminding us that life itself requires a contrast of lightheartedness and tears, neither to the exclusion of the other. In circuses they often function as transition figures, coming on stage between acts to make way for a new event, thus reminding us that we ourselves are always in transition, always in process. Fortunately God, who is also in process, sends clowns to us all the time. Sometimes they are people who invite us to share in playful resilience, sometimes they are animals who make us laugh or give us examples to follow; and sometimes they are fresh possibilities we discover in our imaginations. Process theologians call them initial aims.

However they arrive, clowns lighten our loads and help us take another step in life. Admittedly clowns cannot wave magic wands and eliminate the larger catastrophes of life. Even after the clowns are sent, there will be a hardness in life. But clowns invite us into small but meaningful forms of resilient play which are sufficient grace for the moment at hand. Our calling in life is to receive the clowns we are given with gratitude and, as best we can, to become clowns for others. We, too, can send in the clowns.

Ways to Practice Clown Theology

Claim your clownhood

Clowns, the best of them, project the fragility of human value on a screen beyond measure and across many layers and scales of metaphorical understanding.

-- Maggi Philllips, Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown's Play.
M/C Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2013)

Create a little chaos

Clowns disrupt normalcy in small eddies of activity which often wreak paths of destruction within the tightly ordered rage of social formations....Such incongruous and chaotic trajectories generate laughter and, sometimes, sadness. Moreover, as Weitz observes, “the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought and action” While it may seem insensitive, I suggest that similar responses of laughter, sadness and unlikely avenues of thought and action emerge in the aftermath of cataclysmic events.

-- Maggi Philllips, Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown's Play.
M/C Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2013)

Make peace with uncertainty

I believe God is alive and as real as my next breath. God wants me to grow and explore new ideas. Now I realize that faith is a journey and not a destination, and God is with me with in all my questions and doubts. God’s love includes everyone, including people who ask questions and have doubts!

God does not determine everything, but presents a vision of beauty and the energy to achieve it for every moment of experience.

― Bruce G. Epperly, Process Theology: Embracing Adventure with God

Melt into chocolate

When I think of the word "savor," what first comes to mind is fine chocolate, the rich, dark chocolate that melts slowly in the mouth, the kind of chocolate that warrants perfect concentration and stillness of body—and certainly the closing of eyes. It's as if the taste starts in the mouth, like any other food, but the surprise is too startling, too overwhelming, to be held by the taste buds alone, so the dark joy moves along like an overflowing river into the tributaries of body. But savoring is not confined to taste. A moment of savoring may occur while basking cat-like in a shaft of warm sunshine on a wintery day, or gazing up at flock of pelicans overhead, or listening to Mozart. We want the moment not to simply pass, but to melt—to melt slowly. Savoring is a kind of melting into the moment and letting the moment melt into us.

-- Patricia Adams Farmer, Savoring

Make the most of your regrets

Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Henry David Thoreau

Let that be our yardstick too. When we go out into the world to defend our version of Judaism, our understanding of spirituality, do not be ashamed by those people who may wrap their tefillin more tightly than you do. Be proud to be part of a community that understands that human dignity, decency, equality, love of science, love of justice has no borders, and that we will publicly stand for a Torah of hesed, love, and of mishpat, justice, as did our ancestors. Like the rabbis of old we may tweak here and there, we may modify here and there as they did, in order to preserve the tradition as vibrant and wise and compassionate. But if we remain true to those two values, then we truly stand on the shoulders of the rabbis of the Talmud, and we sit ourselves on the throne of Moses. Hesed u-Mishpat - Love and Justice. I bless us all to be resilient in the love we give to each other, to be tireless in the pursuit of a world of justice, and to insist on using the Torah as God's gift to achieve that vision.

-- Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, God of Becoming and Relationship

Live metaphorically

The life of faith is not one in which everything happens for the best. It doesn't. The life of faith is one of making poems and stories, metaphors and meaning, out of whatever happens. If we let the word poetry be a metaphor for new and hopeful possibilities, then faith is trusting in the possibility of poetry. Or, to say the same thing, trusting in the possibilities of metaphor. After all, metaphors are metaphors for metaphors. Poems are extended metaphors. We turn memories into poems by turning the memories of our lives into tragedies, comedies, tragi-comedies, melodramas, or farces. Whatever the genre, they have meaning for us. We laugh, we cry, we struggle, we hope, we move on. As our memories become poems, we discover within them possibilities for the future. They become metaphors. We remember evenings alone and dinners alone. We speak of our lives as a stories-in-the-making. We remember, we learn from mistakes, we step forward in confidence that something new is possible. With help from metaphors the past becomes future. In process theology the turning of memories into stories and poems and metaphors is called creative transformation. Creative transformation is the very means by which God is present in the world.

-- Jay McDaniel, Faith as Trust in Metaphors

Eat garlic

In Native American spirituality, a mistake is often intentionally woven into weavings to create an opening for the Spirit to move through. I can’t help but wonder if all of the earth-worn types, the black knots, and these decaying jade and powder blue fungi-swirled, worm-eaten boards are other kinds of divine mistakes brought here as some kind of reminder. I can only hope. Later in the night, I fall asleep under a pile of blankets and stars, pungent garlic still in my mouth and a swirl of wood-smoked hair around my face.

-- Joanna E.S. Seibert, Theology in Montana

Paint your mother's toenails

The hospital bed was in front of the bay view window in our living room. My mother's shallow breathing was all I could hear. I dug my hand into the basket of nail polish and uncovered her toes from the layers. My grandmother said that this was unnecessary. I kept polishing. I focused on making every stroke just right. My mother died two weeks after her fortieth birthday. I have a ninety minute drive to and from work,. I sing all the way there and all the way home. And I am a nurse and I am a doctor. The card attached to the bouquet was from Linda's family was in a yellow envelope. The short inscription read: You brought us sunshine, your mom would be proud.

-- Sadie Pauline Hutson, My Mother Joy

Cook your own meals

Cooking requires a space of quiet in the soul to wonder about possibilities. Imagination and inspiration grow out this place. How do we structure our lives for this internal place bearing fertility? Shall we take a Buddhist moment and meditate on the vastness of our kitchens, on the life force pulsating, the umbilical cord of generations of humans providing, for better or worse, for the people they share a space with? Most growth begins with small steps forward. Shall we step forward together and share a meal?

-- Joanna E.S. Seibert, Cooking as a Spiritual Practice

Go to a circus

Indeed, the circus can be theologicum gymnasium...And the clowns — don’t let them make themselves the kinds of fools that don’t matter. Because as some very old Christian theology knew, and as Harvey Cox’s book Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy first taught me, Jesus has been pictured as foolish from the Christian scriptures forward, and Christ the fool or clown continues — to the embarrassment of many — to reappear in the tradition at interesting intervals.

There were of course clowns who provided a through line for the show, popping up between acts to comment, divert attention, and create plots amidst all the juggling, trapezing, horse-acrobaticizing heterogeneity. As theories of carnival and christology both submit to us, though, the clown is rarely just clowning around. Their “foolishness” bears its own significance in putting the larger context “in relief.”

-- Tom Beaudoin http://www.rockandtheology.com/?p=420

Wear green eye shadow

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Wear green eye shadow, dance while you cook, laugh until you cry, climb trees as an adult, always take time to see things through the eyes of a child, wear leopard-patterned hats. Remember that play is a way of praising God.

-- Reverend Teri Daily, For My Daughter

Brush the dust off your jacket

Clowns can be seen as enacting catastrophe with a small “c.” They are experts in “failing better” who perhaps live on the cusp of turning catastrophe into a metaphorical whirlwind while ameliorating the devastation that lies therein. They also have the propensity to succumb to the devastation, masking their own sense of the void with the gestures of play....

In response to the natural forces of destruction—earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions—as much as to the forces of rage in war and ethnic cleansing that humans inflict on one another, a clown makes but a tiny gesture. Curiously, though, those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.

-- Maggi Philllips, Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown's Play.
M/C Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2013)

Sweep light into darkness

Dimitri enters the brightly lit and empty circus ring with a broom in hand. The audience at this point have accepted the signal that Dimitri’s interludes prepare the ring for the next attraction—to sweep, as it were, the sawdust back to neutrality. He surveys the circle for a moment and then takes a position on the periphery to begin what appears to be a regular clean-up. The initial brushes over the sawdust, however, produce an unexpected result—the light rather than the sawdust responds to his broom stokes. Bafflement swiftly passes as an idea takes hold: the diminutive figure trots off to the other side of the ring and, after a deep breath and a quick glance to see if anyone is looking (we all are), nudges the next edge of light. Triumphantly, the pattern is pursued with increasing nimbleness, until the figure with the broom stands before a pin-spot of light at the ring’s centre. He hesitates, checks again about unwanted surveillance, and then, in a single strike (poof), sweeps light and the world into darkness.

This particular clown gesture contradicts usual commentaries of ineptitude and failure associated with clown figures but the incongruity of sweeping light and the narrative of the little man who scores a win lie thoroughly in the characteristic grounds of clownish behaviour. Moreover, the enactment of this simple idea illustrates for me today, as much as it did on its initial viewing, how powerful a slight clown gesture can be. This catastrophe with a very small “c:” the little man with nothing but a broom and an idea destroyed, like the great god Shiva, the world of light.

-- Maggi Philllips, Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown's Play.
M/C Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2013)

Claim your inner buffoon

They are at sixes and sevens here on earth but in tune with the stars, buffoons of time, and heroes of eternity. In the petty cogs of the causal, they appear foolish; in the grand swirl of the universe, they are wise, outmaneuvering their assailants and winning the race or the girl against all odds or merely retaining their skins and their dignity by nightfall.

-- McKnight, Jesse H. “Chaplin and Joyce: A Mutual Understanding of Gesture.” James Joyce Quarterly 45.3–4 (2008): 49e.

Make pancakes out of sawdust

Chaplin is human not because his are the anxieties and frustrations of a man unable to realize his destiny, but because Chaplin—nearly starving, nearly homeless, a ghost in the machine—cannot not resist “the temptation to exist,” the giddiness of making something out of nothing, pancakes out of sawdust. In some sense the clown can survive every accident because s/he is an undead immortal, demiurge of a world without history. (ibid.)

-- Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. “Sublime Comedy: On the Inhuman Rights of Clowns.” SubStance 39.2 (2010): 13e3.

Put on some soul weight

All you really have to remember about Fat Soul Philosophy is that a fat soul is a beautiful soul. In the process world view, God is the very Soul of the world, the ultimate instance of The Fat Soul, the One who lures us and all creation toward widening circles of Beauty. God yearns for beautiful relationships of earth and sky and people and turtles. God yearns for us to know that we are all of a piece, all deeply interwoven and wholly beautiful in our differences.

But aren't we afraid of losing ourselves in the process of widening our circles of empathy and understanding? Fat Soul Philosophy would say that striving for a bigger soul does not diminish one’s own identity, uniqueness, or beauty; rather, it strengthens individual identity and uniqueness in the way a single color is brought to life in a painting by the splash of a contrasting color next to it.

-- Patricia Adams Farmer, What is Fat Soul Philosophy?
See also her webpage: Fat Soul Fridays

Become a carrot-headed, dirty-eared mimi-roll-baker

Grandparents are among those who need to remember who likes nuts in their brownies and who doesn’t, who finds the tags in their shirts irritating and who doesn’t, who wants yogurt on their cereal and who wants milk. Grandparents remember that children possess the ability to experience the world around them in unique ways.

When I’m around Asher and Elliot, I witness first hand that Creativity is the most general notion at the base of all that is. This spring break I played a game with Elliot that I’d played with one of my college classes---creating and hurling “Shakespearean insults” at each other in fun. “Thou saucy clay-brained fustilarian” was our model. I’m not sure even I can define “fustilarian” satisfactorily, but Elliot, 4, “got” the idea. He could make up similar crazy taunts: “You carrot-headed, dirty-eared Mimi-roll-baker!”

-- Barbara Mesle, The Tao of Grandparenting

Flow on and through

Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me this is the message which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should participate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symbolically. It is for us to make it real.

-- Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foots of the Latter. New York: New Directiolns, 1974.

Find your inner bad girl

There is a dispiriting hopelessness that can easily creep into human life: We have a deadening sense that we’ve seen it all; we've done it all; we've been there before; life doesn't change; we're really the same as we were last year; the same as we were the year before. And that sense of the endless repetition of sameness has a word for it in English. We call such a position “Realism.”

A Realist is a person who judges the future by the past. If something was never previously done that way, then it obviously can't ever be done that way, and you are being unrealistic if you think that something that was never done before can be possible. We have a word for that exuberant, extravagant dreamer, too. We call that person a human, because our species, throughout history, regularly accomplishes achievements that were never previously thought possible. That self-surpassing quality is actually our business in the world.

Never believe a Realist. Never believe the people who tell you, "Oh, it can't be that way." All they are asserting is that it's never been that way, yet. Calmly, and with resolute love, show them how it can be different by living the difference. Don't wait for permission. Bring out your inner Bad Girl — and let today's Pharaohs beware!

-- Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Finding Your Inner Bad Girl

Listen to Duke Ellington

I grew up on the prairies, where horizons are further and further away. This creates a sense that boundaries are mutable, and also a sense that we live within what Whitehead calls an Adventure: an adventure of ideas, experiences, encounters, and feelings. As we exist in any given moment, we inherit the past but there are also fresh horizons in the future. The “future” in Whitehead’s thought does not yet exist as actual, not even for God. It is an opening and an openness: a horizon on the prairie. A beyond that is always beyond-ing, but perpetually present to our eyes and ears and hearts.

The sense of the prairies was one of aloneness. In looking back the music took my sense of solitude and connected me to a wider world,a solidarity to the world. When I heard Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts I knew what Whitehead calls Peace - the harmony of harmonies. The Duke said this about that trilogy “Everyone is alone - the basic, essential state of mankind.” Yet the music was one of a group working together, a fusion of multiple and sometimes abrasive textures and styles, the constant reaching across racial, social and national boundaries. His music while giving a sense of isolation it is unimaginable without the voices which gave it life - the band and its members who added their word. The individual players were fused into an unmistakable, personal sound. This gave me a metaphor of the Supreme Love that lures us into new adventures. I felt called to enter the Christian ministry, the metaphor of the jazz ensemble became my metaphor for church and my rationale for ministry. They say that God meets people in terms they understand. God met me through jazz.

-- George Hermanson, How Jazz Changed my Life

Become the person your dog thinks you are

"I made a list of all the persons I harmed. I thought I made amends to everyone on the list. And then I saw a bumper sticker the other day: I want to be the person my dog thinks I am. And I realized that I'd left one off the list. I remember the day you found me. You were left on my doorstep, abused and filthy and scared. You learned to trust me...."

-- Becoming the Person my Dog Thinks I am

Become the person your cat wishes you were

"But one day I really watched him. He was chewing on a piece of grass. He gave his full attention to that single blade. His body was still, his fur soft in the sun. And then I started noticing other things about Charles. He goes out in the rain and doesn't get wet. He takes care of himself, He is a survivor. In recent months I've learned to meditate. I open a window, even in winter, and sit in a black medal chair. Charles sometimes join me. We listen and hold tight to every one of our nine lives."

-- Cats as Spiritual Teachers

Remember stardust

We are made up of that stellar matter that emerged from the big bang. We are a part of the great unfolding of billions of years of a birthing creation that has achieved consciousness of itself. We are dust. Stardust!

-- Paul Bube, From Stardust We Spring

Move forward

"She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful."

--Terri St. Cloud, Taking Care of Yourself