From Simplicity of Faith, 1982, pp. 87-91

It is only since putting aside childish things that it has come to my mind so forcefully – and so gladly – that the circus is among the few coherent images of the eschatological realm to which people still have ready access, and that the circus thereby affords some elementary insights into the idea of society as a consummate event. This principality, this art, this veritable liturgy …this common enterprise of multifarious creatures called the circus, enacts a hope, in an immediate and historic sense, and simultaneously embodies an ecumenical foresight of radical and wondrous splendor, encompassing, as it does both empirically and symbolically, the scope and diversity of Creation.

I suppose some – ecclesiastics or academics or technocrats or magistrates or potentates – may deem the association of the circus and the Kingdom scandalous or facetious or bizarre, and scoff quickly at the thought that the circus is relevant to the ethics of society. Meanwhile, some of the friends of the circus may consider it curious that during intervals when Anthony and I have been their guests and, on occasion, confidants, that I have had theological second thoughts about them and about what the corporate existence of the circus tells and anticipates in an ultimate sense. To either I only respond that the connection seems to me to be at once suggested when one recalls that biblical people, like circus folk, live typically as sojourners, interrupting time, with few possessions, and in tents, in this world. The Church would likely be more faithful if the Church were similarly nomadic.

In America, during the earliest part of this century, the circus enjoyed a “golden age.” It was the era of P.T. Barnum, Adam Fourpaugh, and the Ringling Brothers, to name but a few of the showmen who assembled extraordinary aggregations of performers, animals and oddities. It was then that the circus was most lucidly an image of the Kingdom in its magnitude, versatility and logistics. There were, for example, few permanent zoological collections in those days, and the circus menagerie was the opportunity for people to see rare birds and reptiles, exotic animals and mammals, wild beasts and other marvelous creatures. Indeed, when the Ringling Brothers advertised their “mammoth millionaire menagerie” as the “greatest gathering since the deluge” it was not a much exaggerated boast.

“This is our camp, our moving city; each day we set the show up: jugglers calm amid currents, riding the world, joggled but slightly as in a howdah, on the grey wrinkled earth we rideas on an elephant’s head.”

-Robert Lax

Young William Stringfellow riding an elephant

It was similar with the “sideshows” or “museums” traditionally associated with the American circus. A separate feature from the main circus performance, the side show originated with Barnum. It assembled and exhibited human “oddities” and “curiosities” – giants, midgets, and the exceptionally obese; Siamese twins, albinos, and bearded ladies; those who had rendered themselves unusual like fire eaters, sword swallowers, or tattooed people. If the side show seems macabre because “freaks” were sometimes exploited, it must also be mentioned that in those days little medical help and few other means of livelihood were available to such persons and that the premise of these exhibits was educational. In any case, so long as they continued they symbolized the circus as an eschatological company in which all sorts and conditions of life are congregated.
It is in the performance that the circus is most obviously a parable of the eschaton. It is there that human beings confront the beasts of the earth and tame them. The symbol is magnified, of course, when one recollects that, biblically, the beasts generally designate the principalities: the nations, dominions, thrones, authorities, institutions, and regimes.

There, too, in the circus, humans are represented as freed from consignment to death. There one person walks a wire fifty feet above the ground, another stands upside down on a forefinger, another juggles a dozen incongruous objects simultaneously, another hangs in the air by the heels, one upholds twelve in a

Lion Tamer, John August Swanson

human pyramid, another is shot from a cannon. The circus performer is the image of the eschatological person – emancipated from frailty and inhibition, exhilarant, militant, transcendent over death – neither confined nor conformed by the fear of death any more. The eschatological parable is, at the same time, a parody of conventional society in the world as it is. In a multitude of ways in circus life the risk of death is bluntly confronted and the power of death exposed and, as the ringmaster heralds, defied. Clyde Beatty, at the height of his career, actually had forty tigers and lions performing in one arena. The Wallendas, not content to walk the high wire one by one, have crossed it in a pyramid of seven people. John O’Brien managed sixty-one horses in the same ring, in what a press agent called “one bewildering act”. Mlle. La Belle Roche accomplished a double somersault at great speed and height in an automobile at the time when autos were still novelties. Moreover, the circus performance happens in the midst of a fierce and constant struggle of the people of the circus, especially the roustabouts, against the hazards of storm, fire, accident, or other disaster, and it emphasizes the theological mystique of the circus as a community in which calamity seems to be always impending. After all, the Apocalypse coincides with the Eschaton.

Meanwhile, the clowns make the parody more poignant and pointed in costume and pantomime; commenting, by presence and performance, on the absurdities inherent in what ordinary people take so seriously – themselves, their profits and losses, their successes and failures, their adjustments and compromises – their conformity to the world.

So the circus, in its open ridicule of death in these and other ways – unwittingly, I suppose – shows the rest of us that the only enemy in life is death, and that this enemy confronts everyone, whatever the circumstances, all the time. If people of other arts and occupa tions do not discern that, they are, as Saint Paul said, idiots. (cf.; Ephesians 4:17-18).

The service the circus does – more so, I regret to say, than the churches do – is to openly, dramatically, and humanly portray that death is in the midst of life. The circus is eschatological parable and social parody: it signals a transcendence of the power of death, which exposes this world as it truly is while it pioneers the Kingdom.

Peaceable Kingdom, John August Swanson

Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he made. So they are without excuse; for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, and they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.
(Ephesians 4:17-18)

“Our dreams have tamed the lions,
have made pathways in the jungle,
peaceful lakes; they have built new Edens ever sweet and ever changing. By day from town to town we carry Eden in our tents and bring its wonders to the children who have lost their dream of home.”
~Robert Lax