3
The child has a very limited capacity for Aristotelian abstraction. Seemingly identical slices of cake are not so many species of the genus “slice of cake.” To the child, each one is absolutely unique: thus the child wants this slice, and will grieve, shaken by sorrow and confusion, if offered an identical substitute. That is the flip side of the child’s inherent capacity for wonder: there are no types, no universals, only the particular.
4
The child loves the parent’s face. Imagine standing roughly at the level of other people’s kneecaps, and you will understand children’s almost religious and mystical adoration of the face, their insatiable hunger for direct eye contact with the adult face. The parent who never bends down low to speak with the child is reduced to the role of a mysterious deus absconditus, a pair of trousers that occasionally emits abrupt commands from distant heights.
5
The child sleeps. Adults imitate sleep with various degrees of convincingness, but the child really sleeps: in the car, on the floor, in the parent’s arms, sitting or lying, while playing and while eating. I have observed a two-year-old standing and resting his head on the seat of a chair, fast asleep on his feet like a horse. I have seen children fall asleep halfway through a mouthful of food, or halfway through a sentence. Children sleep because the world is their bed: a big all-encompassing ontological pillow. That is why so many children have trouble getting to sleep at night. When your existence is permanently enveloped in a commodious cushion, the thought of having to confine yourself to one narrow bed seems vulgar and artificial, like going to the beach and being expected to play in the enclosed sandpit.
6
The child in the womb kicks out towards the heart of the mother. All childhood, compressed like a spring, is contained within this kick. The child loves the mother too much, and pushes away to create room for agency. The parent feels this sudden stab of difference, and sustains it. The parent leans in close so that the child can kick out all the more effectively. The agency of the child and the bruised joy of the parent: they are two sides of the same thing.
7
God is the one “from whom all earthly fathers derive their name” (Ephesians 3:14). The joy and sorrow between parents and children is the echo in time of the Son’s sharp kick against the womb of the Father, the sorrow and joy of incarnation.
8
Jesus is the true child. The one who is eternally Child calls God “Parent,” and then echoes this call by becoming a human child, by fabricating within our world a child as an exact copy of its eternal form. Human history is an echo of this eternal call and response between Parent and Child.
9
We are children. Not everyone is a parent, but everyone is someone’s child. That is the secret of life and the foundation of religion.
Circus
Today my three children underwent one of life’s most important rites of passage. An experience that marks a human life forever. A moment that divides each child’s life into Before and After. A sacred, solemn, irreversible ritual. A trial of courage and virtue and strength of heart. A transition from the age of innocence to the age of wisdom and understanding and the fear of the Lord.
I am referring, of course, to the circus. For today—I record this so it will never be forgotten—my children went to the circus.
It all started innocently enough. It was a hot day, and they had gone out for ice cream with their grandmother. Driving down the highway, they saw rising in the distance a great tent, high as mountains, bright as sunrise, shimmering beneath billowing flags and golden spires, solitary and immaculate amid a wild debris of cages, cars, and caravans, a giant pinned to the earth by quivering ropes, smiling madly with its cavernous black maw while crowds gathered outside in nervous lines and the one-eyed man by the ticket stand muttered prophecies thick with Russian and rum, casting secretive sideways glances at the wisecracking monkey on his shoulder. That is how, an hour later, my three defenseless children found themselves seated ringside, wide-eyed, beside their grandmother, gripping their seats with joy, as the jugglers hurled knives and the boys swallowed fire and the gymnast danced on the rolling globe and the sparkling trapeze artists flung themselves through space like falling stars.
The circus—that institution of joy, that spectacle of ecumenism, that tent of democracy, that circle of sobornost, that festive assemblage of man and beast, sensuality and austerity, laughter and terror, life and death—the circus: is it not one of the last enduring signs of humanity in a world grown bloodless, inhuman, and cold? In a world ruled by the Machine, the circus maintains its raucous witness to the joy of Life. In a world ruled by Work, the circus upholds the true doctrine of the primacy of Play. In a world ruled by Death, the circus proclaims the happy gospel of death’s defeat.
It is surely worthy of notice that some of the most imaginative theologians of our time have found particular spiritual solace in the circus. Henri Nouwen likened Christ’s followers to clowns—“he who is called to be a minister is called to be a clown.” He was spellbound by a German trapeze troupe and followed them from place to place until he had befriended them and they had given him lessons. The trapeze, he said, taught him all he needed to know about the way trust conquers fear. He wrote a book about “clowning” and, in his later years, hoped to write a book on the spirituality of the trapeze—though he never lived to do it.
The lay theologian William Stringfellow had an even deeper obsession with the circus. He compared the circus to the kingdom of God and insisted that the church would be more faithful if it were less like a religious institution and more like a circus. “Biblical people, like circus folk, live typically as sojourners, interrupting time, with few possessions, and in tents, in this world.” Like Nouwen, Stringfellow thought the circus exemplified a Christian vision of Christ’s triumph over the fear of death. The circus ridicules death, and so becomes a parable of the coming kingdom: “In the circus, humans are represented as freed from consignment to death. There one person walks on a wire fifty feet above the ground, . . . another hangs in the air by the heels, one upholds twelve in a human pyramid, another is shot from a cannon. The circus performer is the image of the eschatological person—emancipated from frailty and inhibition, exhilarant, transcendent over death—neither confined nor conformed by the fear of death anymore. . . . The circus is eschatological parable and social parody” (Stringfellow, A Simplicity of Faith). Stringfellow filled his home with circus memorabilia. He subscribed to circus magazines. He spent an entire summer—it was the high point of his life—travelling from town to town with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus, until he had blended imperceptibly with the rest of that caravan of prophets, fools, and dreamers. As a popular itinerant lecturer, he used to plan his speaking schedule around circus routes. When asked how often he attended the circus, he once replied, “Not often. About twenty times a year.” Stringfellow always planned to write a full-scale theology of the circus—though, like Nouwen, he died before ever completing that noble piece of intellectual clowning. During a long illness, he built a huge scale model of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. When he died they played circus music at his funeral.
Think for a moment of the desert fathers and mothers, those ascetics who took to the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries. You could make a strong case that the desert ascetics were really a motley crew of wandering circus performers. Half-deranged spiritual clowns dressed in rags, poking fun at worldly wealth and pomp. Ascetic trapeze artists performing their reckless feats atop high columns. Lonely hermits taming the wild beasts as a sign of creation made new. Contemplative