At the circus

Today my three children underwent one of life's most important rites of passage. An experience that marks a human life forever. A moment that divides a child's life into Before and After. A sacred, solemn, irreversible ritual. A trial of courage and virtue and strength of heart. A transition from the age of innocence to the age of wisdom and understanding and the fear of the Lord. I am referring, of course, to the circus. For today – I record this so the date will never be forgotten – my children went to the circus.

It all started innocently enough. It was a hot day, and they had gone out for ice cream with their grandmother. Driving down the main highway, they saw rising up in the distance the great tent, big as a mountain, bright as sunrise, gleaming beneath golden spires and billowing flags, solitary and immaculate amid the wild debris of cages and cars and caravans, a giant pinned to the earth by quivering ropes, smiling madly with that cavernous black maw while the people stood nervously all in line and the one-eyed man by the ticket stand muttered prophecies thick with Russian and rum, casting secretive sideways glances at the wisecracking monkey on his shoulder. That is how, an hour later, my three defenceless children found themselves seated ringside, wide-eyed, beside their grandmother, gripping their seats with joy, as the jugglers hurled knives and the boys swallowed fire and the gymnast danced on the rolling globe and the sparkling trapeze artists flung themselves through space like falling stars.

The circus – that institution of joy, that spectacle of ecumenism, that tent of democracy, that circle of sobornost, that festive assemblage of man and beast, sensuality and austerity, laughter and terror, life and death – the circus: is it not one of the great enduring signs of humanity in a world grown bloodless, inhuman, and cold? In a world ruled by the Machine, does not the circus maintain its raucous witness to the joy of Life? In a world ruled by Work, does not the circus uphold the true doctrine of the primacy of Play? In a world ruled by Death, does not the circus proclaim the happy gospel of death's defeat?

It's intriguing to note that some of the most imaginative theologians of recent times have found particular spiritual significance in the circus. Henri Nouwen had a deep attachment to the circus. He likened Christ's followers to clowns – "he who is called to be a minister is called to be a clown". He was spellbound by a German trapeze troupe and followed them from place to place until he had befriended them. Eventually they even let him practise the trapeze himself. Watching the trapeze artists, he said, taught him all he needed to know about the way trust conquers fear. He wrote a book about "clowning", and, in his later years, hoped to write a book on the spirituality of the trapeze – though he never lived to do it.

The lay theologian William Stringfellow had an even deeper obsession with the circus. He compared the circus to the kingdom of God, and argued that the church would be more faithful if it were less like a religious institution and more like a circus. "Biblical people, like circus folk, live typically as sojourners, interrupting time, with few possessions, and in tents, in this world." Like Nouwen, Stringfellow thought the circus exemplified a Christian vision of Christ's triumph over the fear of death. The circus ridicules death, and so becomes a parable of the coming kingdom: "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…. The service the circus does – more so, I regret to say, than the churches do – is to portray openly, dramatically, and humanly ... 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."

Stringfellow filled his home with circus memorabilia. He subscribed to circus magazines. He spent an entire summer – it was the high-point of his life – travelling from town to town with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus, until he had blended imperceptibly with the rest of that caravan of prophets, fools, and dreamers. As a popular itinerant lecturer, he used to plan his speaking schedule around circus routes. When asked how often he attended the circus, he once replied: "Not often. About twenty times a year." Stringfellow always planned to write a full-blown theology of the circus – though, like Nouwen, he died before ever completing that great piece of intellectual clowning. During a long illness, he built a huge scale model of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. And when he died, they played circus music at his funeral. (A collection of Stringfellow's writings on the circus can be downloaded as a free pamphlet.) The parallels between Nouwen and Stringfellow are extremely striking. Both possessed by a boundless love of the circus, both homosexual in orientation, both committed to living in community, both privileging Christian practice over theory, both turning their backs on academic prestige to live among the poor, both developing quirky autobiographical styles of theology, both dying before they could write their theological treatises on the circus.

And think for a moment of the desert fathers and mothers, those Christian ascetics who took to the deserts of Egypt and Syria in the third and fourth centuries. You could make a strong case that the desert fathers and mothers were really just a motley crew of wandering circus performers. Half-deranged spiritual clowns dressed in rags, poking fun at worldly wealth and power. Ascetic trapeze artists performing their reckless feats atop high columns. Lonely hermits taming the wild beasts as a sign of creation made new. Contemplative acrobats ascending the rungs of their interior ladders while the world looked on, breathless with suspense. Rejoicing clownlike even in sorrow, they renounced the whole wide world as a solemn witness to life and a gigantic joke against death and the devil.

Today as my children swayed in their seats, clutching their hot dogs for dear life, gazing up into the mighty vault of the Big Top while the fearless liturgy spun its circle high above them, I wonder if they heard distant echoes of another performance, another time and place where weary souls drag themselves in from the dust and heat and huddle in a circle, scared and hopeful, hardly believing their eyes and ears when a clownish figure lifts bread and wine like a juggler and bellows out the great joke that is the exhilarating, momentous, stupendously funny secret at the heart of the universe: "Christ is risen!"

Interested in William Stringfellow?

Anthony Dancer (who edited this book) and Myles Werntz are planning to draw together a consortium of people interested in the work of William Stringfellow. They will be compiling an email list in the next few days, to create a discussion about bringing together theologians working with or on Stringfellow. If you're interested in joining this discussion, feel free to email Myles.

Once more with William Stringfellow

Okay, I promise this will be my last post on Stringfellow – here are some brief excerpts from four different essays on Stringfellow (by Stanley Hauerwas, Rowan Williams and others). Note especially the brilliant title of the second essay: “Speaking Nonsense to Power.” I think that’s a great way of summing up Stringfellow’s theology.

“Stringfellow sometimes comes over refreshingly as someone very short on common sense. He had massive imagination, massive depth, and some ways very little self-protective sense. What the world calls common sense was uncommonly lacking in much of what he did. This is characteristic of many of the servants of Jesus Christ throughout the ages, because it is not common sense that they are interested in, it is the uncommon sense of Christ himself.”
—Rowan Williams, “Being Biblical Persons,” in William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, ed. Anthony Dancer (Ashgate 2005), p. 185.

“Whereas the whole 20th-century Christian theological project has been conditioned by multiple arguments about how biblical texts can fit into our way of seeing things (whether that way is one circumscribed by autonomous secular reason or by pluralistic religious expressivism), Stringfellow’s point of departure is to transform existing procedures and to invite us to re-encounter the world narrated biblically. As he said …, his purpose was to construe America biblically, not to construe the Bible Americanly.”
—Simon Barrow, “Speaking Nonsense to Power: The Mission of William Stringfellow,” in William Stringfellow in Anglo-American Perspective, ed. Anthony Dancer (Ashgate 2005), p. 175.

“ ‘Translating’ Stringfellow’s apocalypticism … is a means of evading what he was saying and avoiding what really disturbs the reader about him – the uncompromising character of his criticisms, his refusal to leave any ‘common ground’ for dialogue…. What is so remarkable about Stringfellow’s use of apocalyptic is that he did not think it needed to be demythologized. Rather than seeing apocalyptic as an extravagant and overblown way of talking about matters that liberal politics and social science discuss more directly, Stringfellow … wanted to help us see how apocalyptic language narrates our world.”
—Stanley Hauerwas and Jeff Powell, “Creation as Apocalyptic: A Homage to William Stringfellow,” in Radical Christian and Exemplary Lawyer: Honoring William Stringfellow, ed. Andrew McThenia (Eerdmans 1995), p. 32.

“Stringfellow died before I could have known him personally. In the books, though, he draws us into his circle, mixing anecdotes about himself and his acquaintances in with theological tracts. He seems to offer himself as a friend, one with bits of crazy advice and carelessly-repeated stories. Beneath our cacophonous politics, his pages whisper about how to live in a world both consumed by the power of death and infused in every corner with, for what it is worth, the Word of God.”
—Nathan Schneider, “The Biblical Circus of William Stringfellow”, Religion Dispatches March 2008.

William Stringfellow on the circus

Since Stringfellow was such an avid lover of the circus, I suppose I should conclude our Week of Stringfellow with a passage on the theological significance of the circus:

“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” (A Simplicity of Faith, pp. 89-91).

Normally the theological topics on this blog in any given week are completely random and unrelated. So I’d be interested to know whether readers have enjoyed this week-long focus on a single person. If this was an enjoyable diversion, I’d be happy to do similar themes in future, perhaps focusing on other neglected thinkers. (Lately I’ve been collecting and reading some of Donald MacKinnon’s more obscure and forgotten works: perhaps a MacKinnon week might be fun?)

William Stringfellow: freedom from death

William Stringfellow’s theological writing is pervaded by the conviction that the resurrection of Jesus frees us from the dominion of death. The world is ruled by principalities – by suprahuman, suprapersonal institutional powers which bind human life to the service of death. But the gospel sets us free to live and work within these institutions as servants of Christ; we are freed from the dominion of the principalities, since the resurrection of Christ frees us from the fear of death. Since death is the only power with which the principalities can threaten us, we have nothing whatsoever to fear! This, for Stringfellow, is the gospel; this is the Christian life.

Reading Rupert Shortt’s new biography of Rowan Williams, I came across a passage that beautifully illustrates this theme of freedom from death. On the morning of September 11, Rowan Williams was due to address a group of Christian leaders in a building next to Trinity Church, Wall Street – just one block away from the World Trade Center. They watched and waited in horror as the morning's events unfolded. When the first tower collapsed, their building began to shake and fill with smoke and soot. Rowan gathered with a few others in a stairway, trying to breathe the suffocating air. They felt certain they were going to die. Fred Burnham later described the experience:

“None of us will ever forget it. We were bonded for life. We became comrades in the face of death. And there was in the group a total submission and resignation to the prospect of death…. And I discovered for the first time that I am not afraid of death, and that has totally changed my life. My experience, my every breath from that moment on has been different from anything prior to that. That transformative moment, discovering that you are not afraid to die, can totally transfigure your life” (Rupert Shortt, Rowan's Rule, p. 214).

This is exactly the message of William Stringfellow’s theology: because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we find ourselves strangely unafraid of death’s power; we discover that we are free. And this means that nothing will ever be the same again.

Stringfellow on American leaders

“The … ingenious aggressions of the principalities against human life in society, the victimisation of human beings … by the demonic powers exposes a crucial aspect of the contemporary American social crisis. The American problem is not so simple that it can be attributed to a few – or even many – evil men in high places…. Our men in high places are not exceptionally immoral; they are, on the contrary, quite ordinarily moral. In truth, the conspicuous moral fact about our generals, our industrialists, our scientists, our commercial and political leaders is that they are the most obvious and pathetic prisoners in American society. There is unleashed among the principalities in this society a ruthless, self-proliferating, all-consuming institutional process which assaults … and destroys human life even among, and primarily among, those persons in positions of institutional leadership. They are left with titles but without effectual authority; with the trappings of power, but without control over the institutions they head; in nominal command, but bereft of dominion…. The most poignant victim of the demonic in America today is the so-called leader” (An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land, pp. 88-89).

William Stringfellow on prayer and profanity

“The event of prayer, certain acts called prayer, the very word ‘prayer’ have gathered such ridiculous associations. That is not only the case with the obscene performances, which pass as public prayer, at inaugurations, in locker rooms, before Rotary luncheons, and in many churchly sanctuaries, but also the practice of private prayer is attended by gross profanity, the most primitive superstitions, and sentimentality which is truly asinine…. When I write that my own situation [during my illness] in those months of pain and decision can be described as prayer, I do not only recall that during that time I sometimes read the Psalms and they became my psalms, or that, as I have also mentioned, I occasionally cried ‘Jesus’ and that name was my prayer, but I mean that I also at times would shout ‘Fuck!’ and that was no obscenity, but a most earnest prayerful utterance” (A Second Birthday, pp. 99, 108-9).

William Stringfellow on the power of the state

“Remember, now, that the state has only one power it can use against human beings: death. The state can persecute you, prosecute you, imprison you, exile you, execute you. All of these mean the same thing. The state can consign you to death. The grace of Jesus Christ in this life is that death fails. There is nothing the state can do to you, or to me, which we need fear” (A Second Birthday, p. 133).

And it’s great to see that Halden is also joining in the Week of Stringfellow!

William Stringfellow: a special offer

Thanks to our friends at Wipf & Stock, all of William Stringfellow’s works are now available to F&T readers at a big discount: if you buy any of his books from their website (they have reprinted all his works), you can enter the coupon code STRINGFELLOW40 to receive a 40% discount off the retail price.

Stringfellow’s work has made an enormous impression on me over the past months – I discovered him only recently (thanks to the suggestion of some F&T readers), and since then I’ve read nearly all his works and have thought about him constantly. (Even in Princeton last year, I spent a lot of time trying to persuade folks there to read less Barth and more Stringfellow – since what Barthians today need is precisely a good dose of theological ethics!)

If you’re interested in exploring Stringfellow for the first time, then let me offer a few tips. Personally, I think Free in Obedience is his best book; after that, I’d recommend another superb book on ethics, An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land. Together with these two books, much of his best writing is found in his works of “autobiographical theology” (this is Stringfellow’s own peculiar genre), particularly in his profound meditation on personal illness, A Second Birthday, and in his deeply moving reflections on loss and mourning, A Simplicity of Faith.

Not convinced that you need more Stringfellow in your life? Okay, let me briefly outline a couple of his central themes and preoccupations:

The most striking feature of Stringfellow’s work is his powerful analysis and critique of the “principalities.” For him, the principalities are institutionalised forms of death. Institutions exist for the sake of their own expansion and self-perpetuation; they are not subject to human control, but are autonomous entities vis-à-vis all human agency. Human beings often believe “that they control the institution; whereas, in truth, the principality claims them as slaves” (Free in Obedience, p. 99). The institution seeks only its own prosperity and preservation, and it demands the absolute sacrifice of human life for this goal. “In the end, the claim for service that an institution makes upon human beings is an invitation to surrender their lives in order that the institution be preserved and prosper” (Free in Obedience, pp. 56-57).

The institution thus summons us to death: our idolatrous service to the institution is always a worship of death. “Death is the only moral significance which a principality proffers human beings…. Corporations die. Nations die. Ideologies die. Death survives them all. Death is – apart from God himself – the greatest moral power in the world, outlasting and subduing all other powers” (Ethic, p. 81). So each institution’s quest for survival and self-perpetuation is nothing else than “an absurd tribute to death” (Ethic, p. 90). And the autonomy of these principalities shows the utter vanity of liberal theology’s social gospel: “any social change predicated upon mere human action – whether prompted by a so-called social gospel or motivated by some pietism – is doomed” (Ethic, p. 18).

Stringfellow analyses the function of many types of institutions. For example, he critiques (based on his own experience as a street lawyer in Harlem) the capacity of the legal system to function as an “aggressor” against human life. It is mere sophistry to assume that injustice is merely occasional or aberrant; instead, injustice is built into the very functioning of law as such (Ethic, pp. 84-86). Or, again, he exposes the demonic character of the Protestant work ethic – an “obscene idea of justification” (Dissenter in a Great Society, p. 40) – which underlies middle-class America. “Despite all the ingenious pretensions and vain rationalizations to the contrary, men, according to the Bible, quite literally work to death” (Imposters of God, p. 25). Service to a middle-class work ethic is always ultimately an obscene tribute to death’s victory, and thus a denial of the gospel’s call to freedom from death.

But above all, Stringfellow’s prophetic importance lies in his critique of the way churchly institutions themselves function as demonic principalities. The demonic character of churchly institutions “cannot be hidden by the simple retention of some of the condiments of the Christian faith”; indeed: “Much of what is now discussed and practised in the American churches as the witness of the Church does not really pertain to the witness of the Church to the life and action of God in the world, but rather to the witness of the Church to itself as churchly institution” (Free in Obedience, p. 96). In particular, both “gospel and church [have] become adjuncts or conveyances of civil religion and of a mock-sanctified status of political authority” (Conscience and Obedience, p. 49). The church in America, Stringfellow argues, “has gained so huge a propertied interest that its existence has become overwhelmingly committed to the management of property and the maintenance of the ecclesiastical fabric which that property affords. It is a sign certainly of the demonic in institutional life where the survival of the principality is the dominant morality” (Conscience and Obedience, p. 103).

In all this, Stringfellow’s point is not to advocate any cheap anarchist refusal of institutional life; he is not dreaming of a world without institutions (cf. Free in Obedience, p. 94). Instead, his point is that Christ’s resurrection empowers us to exist with freedom within the various institutions by which our lives are structured; free to live and work without anxiety, without looking to any institution for moral worth or immortality. In short, the Christian is free to obey precisely because she is free from death and from the fear of death. “[Christ’s] resurrection means the possibility of living in this life, in the very midst of death’s works, safe and free from death” (Free in Obedience, p. 72). The task of Christian witness is always “to expose the transience of death’s power in the world” (Free in Obedience, p. 44); and the church is liberated to become something like the true institution, the “exemplary principality” (as Stringfellow somewhere calls it) which fulfills its proper calling by serving God instead of death.

The resurrection of Jesus thus interrupts the demonic rule of the principalities, inaugurating a trajectory of freedom and life amidst the death-regime of the principalities. In this way, the resurrection makes it possible to confront and resist the demands of the principalities in true freedom. “In all idolatry, … death is the reality which is actually worshipped. Death is the deity of all idols; every idol is an acolyte of death…. In light of the Gospel, every life, every person, every event, is included in the context of death and resurrection – of death and the resurrection of life, of death and transcending the power of death…. The resurrection of Jesus Christ means the available power of God confronting and transcending the power of death here and now in the daily realities of our lives” (Imposters of God, pp. 63-65).

If this has whet your appetite, then you really should get into some Stringfellow for yourself: if you want a 40% discount off the retail price, just enter the coupon code STRINGFELLOW40 over at Wipf & Stock.

William Stringfellow: career vs. vocation

“I had elected then [in my early student years] to pursue no career. To put it theologically, I died to the idea of career and to the whole typical array of mundane calculations, grandiose goals and appropriate schemes to reach them…. I do not say this haughtily; this was an aspect of my conversion to the gospel….

“[Later] my renunciation of ambition in favor of vocation became resolute; I suppose some would think, eccentric. When I began law studies, I consider that I had few, if any, romantic illusions about becoming a lawyer, and I most certainly did not indulge any fantasies that God had called me, by some specific instruction, to be an attorney or, for that matter, to be a member of any profession or any occupation. I had come to understand the meaning of vocation more simply and quite differently.

“I believed then, as I do now, that I am called in the Word of God … to the vocation of being human, nothing more and nothing less…. Within the scope of the calling to be merely but truly human, any work, including that of any profession, can be rendered a sacrament of that vocation. On the other hand, no profession, discipline or employment, as such, is a vocation.”

—William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 30-31.

William Stringfellow: theology at the circus

Some time ago, a reader here at F&T recommended the work of William Stringfellow – a writer I had never really come across till then. And when Kim Fabricius came to visit recently, he told me that he had also started reading Stringfellow. So this week I finally started reading him too, beginning with the excellent Eerdmans anthology. This is astonishing stuff – Stringfellow’s analysis of the principalities is especially good. I’m also intrigued by his love for the circus (he and his partner Anthony Towne once spent the summer traveling with a circus!). Here’s an excerpt of Stringfellow’s theological reflection on the circus:

“The circus is among the few coherent images of the eschatological realm to which people still have ready access and ... 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 splendour, encompassing, as it does both empirically and symbolically, the scope and diversity of creation. I suppose some ... 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.... To [these people] 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.”

—William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Writings of William Stringfellow (Eerdmans, 1994), p. 53.