"I feel like I have too many plates in the air."
"I keep dropping balls."
"I'm walking a tight rope here.
"My life is like a three-ring circus.
Or, maybe even, "Not my circus; not my monkeys."If so, you're not alone. It’s actually not all that uncommon to hear images from the circus used to describe the chaos (and, sometimes, the joy and delight) of our lives. Inside the Big Top there is a wild, out of control quality which is a large part of its allure. What do we mean when we say -- as people have said throughout time -- that we want to "run away and join the circus."? For many "The Circus" symbolizes adventure, a life without oppressive regularity, unbridled freedom; it's big, it's bold, it's brash, it's wild. In the song, “The Greatest Show,” from the movie musical The Greatest Showman, the circus is describes as being “covered in all the colored light,” a place where “the impossible comes true.”
At the same time, though, most people recognize that “The Circus” might be a nice place to visit for an hour or two, it's a world most of us really only want to peer into. Truth be told, we're just as glad when it pulls up stakes and moves on to another town. To quote from Ryan Lewis, Justin Paul, and Benj Pasek’s song again, we know that in The Circus, “the runaways are running the night,” and that the whole thing has something of the quality of a “fever dream.” It's not for nothing that Ray Bradbury used a traveling carnival for his 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. At the same time that we're drawn to it, we sense something frightening in it as well.
There is something primal in The Circus, which may well be why we seem to so often turn to the imagery of circus arts when trying to describe a life that's a little (or more than a little) "out of control." Yet we also turn to those very same images to symbolize a life that’s in control, a life being lived skillfully. A person can speak with pride about their ability to “juggle so many things at once,” while someone else might bemoan the difficulty they’re having “keeping everything up in the air.”
Preachers are often accused of "finding a sermon in everything." To a certain extent, that's a well-deserved stereotype. Trappist monk Thomas Merton once wrote, "Nothing has ever been said about God that hasn't already been said better by the wind in the pine trees." (Nature has often been called, "God's other Bible.") Poets have demonstrated over and over again that anything can be used as a symbolic vehicle for the deliver of insight, and what is religious language if not fundamentally poetic? So why not look at life through the lens of The Circus? Over the next several weeks that's exactly what I'm going to do.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
