Stringfellow on Friday – the circus

Stringfellow often took time out from the routine of his life to get into his car and follow the circus from town to town. Indeed I think I remember somewhere reading that he had his car specially adapted to allow him to live on the road. He was also a collector of circus memorabilia which he had scattered about his house on Block Island. One of the main reasons for his fascination was because it taught him eschatology.

Even in his day this was thought to be theologically scandalous, or lightweight, like he was making some spurious sermonic connection or sappy illustration. But typical of Stringfellow his reflections were much more profound than that, or at least more lyrical. Take this quotation for example, from A Simplicity of Faith, published in 1982.

“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 any more…. So the circus, in its open ridicule of death … 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…. The service the circus does – more so, I regret to say, than the churches do – is to portray openly, dramatically, and humanly that death 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”

Living free of the power of death is a constant theme in his writing. And isn’t this a vivid, exhilarating view of the Christian life?