Sacred Clowns. St Francis of Assisi and the Lakota Heyoka
I happened to be reading Chesterton's, Life of St. Francis of Assisi at the same time i was reading Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions. I was reading chapter V of Chesterton's book *Le Jongleur de Dieu"* while the reading of Lame Deer's chapter 15, "The Upside-Down, Forward-Backward, Icy-Hot Contrary." was still fresh in my mind. Chesterton's chapter is literally translated as the juggler (or tumbler) of God but could be equally well rendered "The Clown of God." Lame Deer writes in his chapter 15 of the heyoka, the sacred clown of the Lakota people. I have never personally witnessed one of the "Fools for Christ" of the Russian Orthodox Church or the ceremonial clowns of the Hopi; but i have, as a child and a parent, seen circus clowns and rodeo clowns. One of the jobs of a clown is to change perspectives (even the perspectives of charging bulls). When twenty large men come tumbling out of a space that could not possibly held more than four of them, children (and maybe some of their parents) are presented with a mystery, with something that cannot happen but does. Circus clowns wear frozen smiles and frozen tear stained eyes--(are they happy being sad or sad because everybody isn't happy? A clown doesn't seem to mind embarrassing himself by doing stupid or shameful things.
Clowns frighten some people, one of my ex-sons-in-law was deathly afraid of clowns and of almost nothing else. Clowns are too common characters in horror stories. There is passive menace in the painted face which gives no clue to the real intentions behind the paint. The are loved and feared in various degrees like God himself. It is the clown's job to make us laugh, but not only to laugh.
The moon is sacred to the Zuni in such a manner that "moon shots" and cosmonauts walking about on its surface is extremely troubling. When the United States put men on the moon in 1969, Zuni clowns put on a skit mocking the moon landing. All the people laughed. Even some white observers thought it was hilarious. The Zuni were able to put the intrusion into an acceptable perspective with the help of their clowns.
I think that clowning might be a part of every spiritual tradition. Laughter itself may be sacred. Perspectives certainly require change. The circumstances of pomp hide layers of hypocrasy that deserve to be exposed. Things are not as they seem and the more we are reminded of that the better.
When the rodeo clown flashes his red undergarment at the charging bull or the strutting champion rider he is telling us that things can be looked at in other ways than we are used to looking at them.
"If a man saw the world upside down,
with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one
effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence. There is a Latin
and literal connection; for the very word dependence only means hanging.
It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hung the
world upon nothing. If St. Francis had seen, in one of his strange
dreams, the town of Assisi upside down, it need not have differed in a
single detail from itself except in being entirely the other way round.
But the point is this: that whereas to the normal eye the large masonry
of its walls or the massive foundations of its watchtowers and its high
citadel would make it seem safer and more permanent, the moment it was
turned over the very same weight would make it seem more helpless and
more in peril. It is but a symbol; but it happens to fit the
psychological fact. St. Francis might love his little town as much as
before, or more than before; but the nature of the love would be altered
even in being increased. He might see and love every tile on the steep
roofs or every bird on the battlements; but he would see them all in a
new and divine light of eternal danger and dependence. Instead of being
merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would
be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be
thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to
be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so,
when he was crucified head-downwards." -- G. K. Chesterton, The Life of St. Francis pp, 74-75
The last shall be first, and the first, last.