Clowns are not in the center of the vents. They appear between the great acts, fumble and fall, and make us smile again after the tensions created by the heroes we came to admire. The clowns don't that it all together, they do not succeed in what they try, they are awkward, out of balance, but... they are on our side. We respond to them not with admiration, but with sympathy, not with amazement but with understanding, not with tension but with a smile. Of the virtuosi we say, "How can they do it?" Of the clowns we say, "They are like us." The clowns remind us with a tear and a smile that we share the same human weaknesses … The longer I was in Rome, the more I enjoyed the clowns, those peripheral people who by their humble, saintly lives evoke a smile and awaken hope, even in a city terrorized by kidnaping and street violence.
Nouwen then names "four clownlike elements" of the spiritual life: solitude, devotion (or celibacy), prayer, and contemplation. "My growing love for the clowns in Rome made me desire to clown around a little myself and speak about such foolish things as being alone, treasuring emptiness, standing naked before God, and simply seeing things for what they are." He added that within the bustle of Rome's grandeur, he discerned another desire within, a creativity that "wants to play, dance, smile, and do many other 'useless' things." And by 'useless' Nouwen means profoundly personal acts of compassion, companionship, creativity, and community-building like the students "wasting their time with grade-school drop-outs."
The Medical Mission sister dedicating all her time to two old women who had become helpless and isolated... the young men and women who picked up the drunks from the streets during the night and gave them a bed and some food. The priest forming communities for the handicapped ... women and men of all ages offering their lives to others with a disarming generosity.
I found myself returning to one of Alana Levondowsk's songs that gave shape and form to Thomas Merton's comments about St. Theresa of Lisiuex: "Little Flower."
I can't fully explain why this song grabs me where I live. Beverly Lanzetta writes that the sacred can only be hinted at poetically and evocatively: it is too sublime to confine to linear explanations. On my journey, her words - and Alana's song - come as close as possible in this realm. First, there are the "useless" little flowers and clowns who live for tenderness rather than recognition, power, or productivity.
Then there was what Fr. Richard Rohr wrote about spending time with those in the community of Mother (now saint) Theresa of Calcutta. Serendipitously, his time in that community came to a close on October 1, the feast day St. Teresa, who is one of Rohr's all-time favorite mystics! He observed that for the first time he:
... finally met a “conservative” yet fully contemporary form of religious life that I could trust. The sisters were not rigid; rather, they were simply devoted women. They did not need security, answers, and order, as we see in most traditionalist movements in the West. In fact, they were willing to live without security, with very few answers to their questions of mind and heart, and amid almost total disorder. All in union—hour by hour—with God. They lived that amazing and rare combination of utter groundedness and constant risk-taking that always characterizes the true Gospel. The sisters didn’t waste time fixing, controlling, or even needing to understand what is wrong with others. Instead, they put all of their time and energy into letting God change them. From that transformed place, they serve and carry the pain of the world, which they are convinced is the pain of God. This is the synthesis on a communal level that I am always seeking. I have encountered it in many individuals, but hardly ever in public and social form.
And when asked why this order did not engage in the social powers that create so much of the suffering they attend to, Rohr was calm told that:
Mother Teresa felt that if... she played the firebrand she could not be what Jesus had told her to be—love to and for all. She said that if she started correcting and pointing out “sinners” she could no longer be an instrument of love and reconciliation for them. Humiliated and defensive people do not change. Like her patron Thérèse of Lisieux, “her vocation in the church was to be love.” She knew that her primary message had to be her life itself, not words or arguments or accusations. She had found that “third something” that is always beyond the calculating and dualistic mind.
In my journey of faith, this simplicity resonates with me at this stage of life. It celebrates the way Nouwen describes sacred clowns as "useless" to the world but so vital, too. And, it does not negate the importance of organize against social injustice. Rather, it acknowledge, as St. Paul insisted, that the Holy Spirit gives to us various gifts and each individual does not carry all the Spirit's charisms. I know that at other times in my life I have been an organizer. An advocate. An activist ally. But not now. Today, as an old, straight, white male intellectual, I am much more of a holy fool who simply lives and shares small and often seemingly insignificant acts of love. Period. Well, ok, I still do some advocacy online and am allied with the Poor Peoples Movement. But my life, in person and online, is much more "useless" as the charism of the clown fills my soul.
As I write this confession, the political realities of my nation have become absurd as well as dangerous. The current regime is acting out ugly threats to subvert the recent presidential election as it hunkers down into conspiracy theories. Its allies are both the lunatic fringe of American right wing ideology and crass opportunists positioning and posturing for elected office in 2024. That they care little about the short or long term consequences of their hatred is irrelevant right now: they are going to do everything short of violent insurrection to advance their cause - and some less stable souls will inevitably spill over into acts of violence, too. In a nation saturated with weapons and hellbent on selfish individualism, you can see disaster coming. It is sad, frightening, tragic, ugly, and raging towards a full blown confrontation that few seem willing to avert...
... all the more reason why the charism of the foolish and useless clown takes on a new urgency...
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