Kevin Seasolts OSB traces the significance of the clown or the fool in Christian spiritual and cultural perspectives. Invoking the visions of such artists as Fellini, Rouault and Picasso, he reminds us that the only way to climb the ladder of holiness is to climb down the ladder of humility.
In 1971 Federico Fellini, the distinguished Italian cinematographer, completed a provocative film which he called The Clowns. He searched out the practitioners of pre-cartoon art, the men who embodied the child’s nightmares, who mocked respectability with their crumpled tuxedos, who defied death itself with their prop hatchets and their cudgels and cannons. Fellini gloried in the grotesqueness of his clowns’ faces, the noses swollen like red balloons in parody of drunkenness, the sad eyes giving the lie to the garish smiles of the painted mouths, the harvest hair-dos and the eternally lifted brows.
But then with the freedom of genius, Fellini moved from the sawdust ring to the small provincial towns of Italy, each with its own pathetic clown – the saloon drunkard who acts out his one-man war-games before his amused bar-mates; the martinet station-master who moves like a machine and makes the trains all run on time, the buffoon police chief who even enforces salutes from little school children. With the same freedom Fellini moves into your life and mine – into the lives of all of us who sometimes take ourselves too seriously.
Wearing masks
Magdalena Abakanowicz has captured the emptiness of human life in her sculpted textiles. When the Nazis invaded Poland in World War II, she saw drunken soldiers mutilate her mother’s body. It occurred to her then that the human body is like a piece of fabric – it can be torn apart so easily. She felt a great need to rage against the violence, the fear, the destructiveness and the tragedies of human life. As an adult artist, she chose to work in fabric as the best medium suited to serve her inspirations and inner yearnings.
Among her most challenging works is a mysterious series of ‘Backs’ – all different, though all alike. Eighty human backs without heads, without legs to their thighs, without hands to their arms. Most poignantly, the backs have no fronts or centres; they are hollow, each man hiding his own emptiness by crouching forward. They seem to groan in T.S. Eliot’s words, ‘We are the hollow men…’ Abakanowicz formed them from burlap and glue on the plaster cast of the back of a muscular male. Their isolation and yet their closeness, their emptiness and yet their potential for fullness of life, their individualism and yet their longing for community, all so sadly negated by their condition, cry out for rescue, for deliverance, for salvation, and for a new life of creativity, redemption, support, and sustenance.
Humanity, humour and humility
Our world, however, has little sympathy for the virtue of humility. It rather champions power, prestige, and praise. But we all know from experience that we are transformed as Christians not when we receive the accolades of praise, prestige, and power but rather when we experience our human diminishments and limitations. It is then that we become like beggars standing before the Lord with empty bowls in our hands. And in God’s good time and in God’s mysterious ways, God fills those bowls with God’s own gifts which not only bring us closer to God but closer to each other.
Broken vessels
In the prime of his life he was the recipient of much praise, even received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 1988, but then he lost his leg in an auto accident and even more tragically he lost his wife and two little girls through a painful marital breakdown. He learned humility through the very sad experience of humiliation. He came to understand that when we live in community, together with others, we will regularly disappoint and hurt one another because we are members of a broken body. He also came to realize the profound truth that we are brought together in Christian community by faith in the Lord Jesus, by Someone who is other and infinitely greater than we are. He simply acknowledged that we are desperately in need of a Saviour who will deliver us from our weakness and fears, from our suffering and disappointments, and who will deliver us into the hands of a loving God who empowers us to know, accept, and love ourselves and know, accept, and love one another – all in Jesus Christ and through the power of the Spirit. But the most awesome lesson he learned was that even though his heart was a broken vessel, he nonetheless was gifted with the mysterious presence of a loving and faithful God.
It was the regular celebration of the Eucharist that sustained him in the darkest of his days. He learned that if we are to be one with Christ in glory, we must first of all be one with Christ on the cross. The simple fact is that when we are humble and above all when we are humiliated, we often feel like fools, especially in our world today where we are expected to present ourselves as highly self-actualized individuals who have put all the pieces of our broken lives together.
Low tolerance of fools
One night at the Medrano Circus in Paris, aerial artists risked their lives at every move. Meanwhile a clown sat on a drum in the middle of the ring and dreamily looked up in awe at the trapeze, his face smeared with white grease paint. In amazement he saw that the acrobats were literally taking their lives in their own hands. But then the music stopped. The master of ceremonies in formal evening clothes walked over to the clown and clouted him back to the real world with a loud bang. The crowd roared with laughter as two large tears appeared on the clown’s white face. But in his anguish he kept silent and still.
An unknown painter left the circus and hurried back to his studio. The image of the game of life and death played out in the air and the mockery of an innocent victim acted out below struck him with such force that the scene remained with him as a haunting experience for years to come. That night he painted the first of three hundred canvases portraying the figure of Christ as a white clown mocked by soldiers. The name of the clown was Grock, a classic name in the history of clowning. The painter’s name was Georges Rouault.
Playing the King’s Game
Games, similar to the King’s Game, have been played for hundreds of years, especially at the time of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. Reflecting on the custom, students of comparative religions and of depth psychology have shown how threats to human survival, such as storms which accompany changes in the seasons of the year, have often produced in men and women feelings of anxiety and threat. The human urge is to objectify and to exteriorize such forces, to play them out of the way, or to hurl them on the head of a scapegoat who will carry the evil into the wilderness.
That instinct survives down to our own day. It is reflected in the image of the fool in Shakespeare’s plays, in the king and queen of our Mardi Gras celebrations, in the white-faced clowns in our circuses, in the six million Jews annihilated in Hitler’s Europe, and in the poets and artists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn who portray the truth of the human situation and are banished in one way or another to the wilderness. The instinct is surely reflected in the racial and cultural aliens whom we hide behind our prison walls and other institutions.
Meaning of Christ’s suffering
The disciples of Jesus are men and women who are not resigned to the pathetic quality of human life. They choose to pass through painful tragedies as the port of entry to new life. In the midst of sickness and sadness, they proclaim that the kingdom of God is close at hand. In the midst of a security-conscious economy, they refuse to store up gold and silver; they do not worry about having a few coppers in their purse. They go out like gentle sheep among wolves; though they are cunning as serpents, they are harmless as doves.
Perhaps the reason why there is so little space for the clown in our society may be the same reason why there is so little space for Christ. He too was incognito, disguised in the flesh, a man of no reputation, despised and rejected, a man acquainted with sorrow and grief, a man of such countenance that no one thought him comely.
Death into resurrection
Like Andre Dubus, we Christians find our greatest support and challenge in the celebration of the Eucharist. There we gather as the foolish people we are, but intentionally we gather to play a role and in a sense to put on masks. We pretend to be what we actually are and what we hope more and more to become. We hope to be truly the Body of Christ and so we put on Christ, believing that he embraced death and came to life again. We set out fragile vessels of bread and wine which when transformed become the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. The holy bread is broken, the holy wine is poured out and shared. And in that sharing the Heart of the Lord Jesus speaks to our sometimes broken hearts. He says, ‘Come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will refresh you.’
Only a fool would believe these things – but then it is only a wise person who can be a fool.
This article first appeared in Spirituality, a publication of the Irish Dominicans.
Fellini ends his film with a comic funeral. The clowns are laying Auguste, the classic ragamuffin, to rest. But in the breakdown of the ornate hearse, in the mock pieties accompanying the reading of the will and the general insolence of the irreverent, capricious mourners, Fellini transforms death into resurrection. He wants to repudiate the death of clowning in our modern world. So he repudiates it, and like the clowns he champions, he turns his face on death itself and embraces life.When we attempt to analyze the meaning of the suffering of Jesus as well as that of all the suffering in our contemporary world, we find our theological reflections obscure and our biblical reconstructions inadequate. Nevertheless the harsh realities of human life force us to resonate with the suffering of Jesus. In spite of our fumbling efforts at interpretation, the incongruity of an innocent victim rings true. The white-faced clown playing the King’s Game in the procurator’s courtyard gives us a glimpse of the meaning of faith as venture and risk. Christian faith summons us to venture life itself and to surrender to the proclamation of God’s loving kindness which brings us lasting life. The biblical faith of Christians is concerned, not with the strengthening of an ailing human body which is then deified, but rather with the mystery of healing transcendence and with the miracle of people who surrender their whole existence to the Father of all life, just as Jesus did. The clown in the King’s Game is far more than a model of suffering endured and far more than a witness to the incongruities of human existence. In the white face with the crown of thorns and the crimson cloak we see the compassionate and forgiving face of our God.On the site of what some think to be Pontius Pilate’s palace in Jerusalem, archeologists have uncovered the pavement of an ancient courtyard. On the flagstones may be seen roughly engraved lines, possibly those of a game that Roman soldiers played to while away the monotony of their watches. It was commonly called the King’s Game because the winner became a royal figure for the night. It has been suggested that Jesus was forced to join his Roman guards in playing the King’s Game in the courtyard of Pilate’s palace. He played the game and won. Hence he has appeared in iconography wearing a crown of thorns and a crimson cloak.In the eyes of the world, the person who is truly Christian is regularly looked upon as a fool sometimes as a source of contempt, ridicule and even sly laughter. Our world is not very tolerant of fools; it does not suffer fools gladly – in the same way that our world is not very tolerant of clowns. In fact the authentic clown is only possible in the world of the Christian imagination, where there is a very solid and enduring belief to sustain a double-vision of the world here and now and the world above and beyond and hereafter. Humour, warm, kind, open-hearted, and hospitable, a humour in which we can all share and be one in a burst of laughter, this humour disappears in a one-level world, a so-called realistic world, from which dreams have fled in the face of condescension and derision. Such a world has but one reaction to embarrassment or human frailty – and that reaction is violence. Our world is full of it – even in our so-called entertainment.Andre Dubus, who died several years ago, was a distinguished American short story writer and essayist. A number of his autobiographical essays have been published under the title Broken Vessels. It is St Paul, of course, who long ago reminded us that we are earthen vessels, sometimes cracked, sometimes broken. Dubus picked up that image in the title of his book.There are indeed intense yearnings in the human heart – yearnings that God so longs to satisfy. When he was the abbot of the Benedictine community at Ampleforth in England, Cardinal Basil Hume gave a conference in which he set out three human qualities that he felt were essential in the lives of Christians if they were to respond to God’s loving initiative in seeking to satisfy the yearnings of the human heart. The qualities were humanity, humour, and humility. All three words come from the Latin humus – which means ‘earth.’ We Christians are men and women who are meant to stay close to the earth. In keeping with the seventh chapter of Benedict’s Rule, Basil Hume put special emphasis on humility. He knew well that the only way to climb the ladder of holiness is to climb down the ladder of humility. He also knew that the higher we climb the ladder of social success the harder we fall when we are brought low by our own foibles and the foibles of others. He knew well that sometimes the only way to humility is by way of humiliations.Like the clown we spend much of our life playing roles and wearing masks. We are afraid to be who we are, but in many ways we really do not want to be what we pretend to be. So our little lives are often pathetic pieces. Picasso and Rouault, whose oils helped set the pattern of much of modern art’s preoccupation with the pathetic quality of our contemporary human situation, often portrayed the human person as a clown. Smeared with grease paint, motley men and women exhibit themselves before a faceless audience in a circus that seems to have little meaning.
