Editor’s Note: Kate Foran served as an intern and staff for Word and World from July 2004 through January 2006. She is now serving on the national board.

In a time when “circus” is likely to conjur images of animal cruelty and overcrowded city civic centers, it is hard to imagine that the performance of that spectacle could be likened to the in-breaking of the Kingdom of God. At least, it was hard for me to imagine, until I learned to see the circus through the eyes of the lay theologian William Stringfellow, the poet Robert Lax, and the artist John August Swanson. The discipline of attending to the world—in the circus and elsewhere—for evidence of Grace practiced by these three helped me open my eyes to transformative moments around me.

Fantastic Feat, John August Swanson

When Word and World decided to undertake a weekend school exploring the life and work of William Stringfellow, we discovered that one of the benefits of basing a school on one person’s biography is the light we shed on obscure corners of a life. For instance, where Stringfellow is known, he is generally known as a lay theologian, author, and street lawyer. But he was also a connoisseur of the circus. He collected memorabilia, photographs, even the autograph of lion tamer Clyde Beatty. Some who knew him recount that he would accept speaking engagements on the basis of whether the circus was in town. He understood the circus, as he interpreted most everything, Biblically. In Stringfellow’s musings on the circus, he explains the circus as a liturgy, a nomadic community, and a peaceable kingdom where lions are tamed and people of all sorts are gathered. It is a spectacle, but it invites participation. According to Stringfellow, the transient nature of the circus, along with its color, bombast, and death defying acts, all offer insight into the eschatalogical realm of the coming of God.

Stringfellow was not alone among his contemporaries in this idea. Poet Robert Lax (friend of Thomas Merton) also followed the circus, and wrote a series of poetry about his experience. For Lax, who watched the circus folk set the tents up and tear them down, and who watched the acrobats fumble and get up again until ready for performance, the circus represented a creation story as well as a parable of Death and Resurrection. Artist and activist John August Swanson, best known for his serigraph images of Biblical narratives, has also drawn on images of the circus to explore themes of how we enter the “sacred circle” to participate in the balancing act that is the community of creation. All three share a conviction that perhaps, with its performance of a living Word transcendent over the powers of oppressive social norms, cynicism, and death— the circus was in fact more church than church. In this way, their writing, poetry, and art puts in one ring the images of clowns and priests; wandering nomads and circus parades. It juggles together both acrobats and angels; tents and tabernacles; lion tamers and peaceable kingdoms; theology and three ring extravaganzas. And the circus images begin to blur with the theological ones at precisely the point of vulnerability where discipline becomes Grace. (above is Great Circus, John August Swanson)

Discipline and Grace: it is the balancing act on the unicycle; the swinging acrobat whose muscles have memorized the moment to let go. It is God’s economy, the tightrope tension between limits and abundance: the manna stories of reliance on God for sustenance, the discipline required in the communal practice of gathering just enough, and the bounty that rains down.

Still life with juggling pins and word boxes by Ted Lyddon Hatten

Study of Stringfellow’s circus theology, Lax’s poetry, Swanson’s art, along with scripture, is much the same: it challenges me to comb through the stories, attentive, disciplined, receptive. Stringfellow’s passion for the circus also urged me to identify where else we might find this kind of “circus theology” of restraint and extravagance. In seeing the circus as a kind of controlled calamity that recreates the order of the everyday world, I think of Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who was a child in San Francisco when the real disaster of the 1906 earthquake turned that city upside down. She spent the rest of her life trying to recreate and embody the spirit of community and mutual aid that arose in the first moments following the catastrophe. It’s as if her disciplines of hospitality to the poor and resistance to violence were the acrobat’s preparation–the practice for, the practice of, the Grace that overtakes you, the Kingdom breaking in.

At least I know that this readiness is what I often find at the Beloved Community’s Homeless Hospitality House, where pecans fall from the trees and people without homes or jobs show me where to gather them. Indeed, to spend time with the newly born, or those facing death, or people struggling with addiction, or people walking in an economic lion’s den is to draw near to the same mystery Stringfellow found in the circus. It is to face, as Stringfellow notes, the reality of our precariousness—which is to make us aware of our need for God—which is finally to resist death’s hold.

Balancing Act, John August Swanson

We are wanderers in the earth, but
Only a few of us in each generation
Have discovered the life of charity, the
Living from day to day, receiving
Our gifts gratefully through grace,
And rendering them, multiplied
Through grace, to the giver. That
Is the meaning of your expansive, out-
Ward arching gesture of the arm in
The landing; the graceful rendering,
The gratitude and giving.

Robert Lax, describing the acrobat’s landing in Circus Days and Nights

Above, still life with juggling pins and word boxes by Ted Lyddon Hatten