Lessons From (and for) The Circus of Life: Trapeze

Sam Keen -- the author of such books as Fire in the Belly and Your Mythic Journey -- has had a life-long dream of being a trapeze flyer.  It began when he was a child and went to his first circus.  There were all the usual acts, but it was the trapeze artist who most captured his imagination.  He's said that when the flyer let go of his bar to fly to the catcher, in his mind's eye he remained in mid-air.  And he's remained there ever since.  "The Flying Man" became a mythic touchstone for him long before he had those words to describe it.  Yet as with most of us, as he grew up his childhood dream faded into the background of an adult life of family and work.

At the age of 62 he heard an ad on television for the San Francisco School of Circus Arts, inviting ordinary folk to come learn the skills and art of the flying trapeze.  Believing himself too old for such a thing, Keen nonetheless went one night to observe a class.  This was as close as he thought he would come to touching his childhood dream.  The teacher, however, didn't let Keen sit it out on the sidelines, instead prodding him to try.  He did.  He found himself returning the next week.  And the one after that.  Soon a new passion was born, a passion that eventually led to his putting a practice bar in his living room (which had 16' ceilings), and a full rig in his backyard.  It also led to his writing the book Learning to Fly -- trapeze: reflections on fear, trust, and the joy of letting go.

I offered a reflection in February of 2019 to the congregation I serve about some of what I'd learning in my reading of this book.  I am sure that it is only the first of many.  After all, the metaphors of the circus are deep and rich ... and I'd only read about half of the book at the time I wrote that sermon!

Keen's subtitle is a synopsis of several of the spiritual lessons to be found among those who "fly through with the greatest of ease" -- fear, trust, letting go.  Quite literally, being a trapeze artist requires you to learn to let go in spite of a quite reasonable fear of falling if you do.  There's only just a few letters difference between flying and falling.  You could add failing into that mix, too.  We want to fly, but are afraid we'll fail and fall.  Sound at all familiar?

One of the things that trapeze has taught Keen is that it's not only important, it's essential for a flyer to work through the fear of falling.  Whenever you're trying to learn a new trick, you should first practice missing the trick, so that you can learn how to fall safely.  There is, he says,

“a fundamental principle — learn the fall before the trick; prepare for failure.  From the moment when a fledgling accomplishes the first free fall, progress in flying and falling go hand in hand. […] the great flyers have always been great fallers.”

That might sound somewhat counter intuitive at first. Most of us would probably rather put of letting go until we know there'll be someone or something there to catch us or for us to catch ourselves on.  Apparently, though, if you really want to fly you get there by preparing not to be caught, which teaches you that you'l survive the fall.  (If, of course, you've learned how to fall safely, which is a skill in itself.)

Does that sound scary?  Well, maybe it is.  He talks about Isabel Caballero, one of the few women who perform the triple somersault, who has said, "Even after all these years I am afraid all the time.  Every time I climb up on the pedestal I look down and think about how high up it is.  But," she adds, "I love flying more than I fear it."

How do we get there?  How do we get to the place where we can say, honestly, about our own lives, that we love them more than we fear them?  That we love Life -- with all of its inherent challenges ad risks -- more than we fear it?  I'll give Sam Keen the last word:

"We learn to fly not by becoming fearless, but by the daily practice of courage.”

Pax tecum,

RevWik

This is an image from Birds of Prey, Vol 1, #8.  For those who don't follow
the escapades of the Batman and the rest of the "Bat Family,"
this is Dick Grayson (the original Robin and, now Nightwing who was part of
his family's circus flying troupe as a child), and Barbara Gordon (the orignal Batgirl,
who was paralyze when the Joker shot her in the spine, and who became Oracle,
the eyes, ears, and computer wizardry of heroes throughout the DC universe).
When Barbara was complaining about feeling so "earthbound" after losing
the use of her legs (and her life as Battgirl), Dick brought her to the circus to
experience the joy of flying once more.

A Leap of Faith (part 2)

Last week I wrote about that well-known phrase, "leap of faith."  It's like walking above a chasm on a bridge the far side of which is shrouded in fog, I wrote.  It's like taking a step up even when you can't see the entire staircase you've begun to ascend.  It's like stepping into cold water, trusting that it's really dry land.

Yet for all that, I think I wasn't really looking at a true "leap of faith."  For sure what I was describing was an act of courage and faith.  It might even be indescribably hard to take that step, especially when you really can't see through the fog to the other side ... when you can't even really be sure that there is another side.  I don't want to disparage this in the least.  A real leap of faith, though, requires something that's missing from these metaphors.

In the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade there's a scene in which Indiana finds himself in a cave at the edge of a huge cliff.  He as to get to the other side, but there just isn't any way to get there.  He can't go back and take a different path to see if he can avoid the drop altogether.  There's no bridge to cross, with the far side shrouded in fog or not.  He is well and truly trapped.

Yet he's been following the clues in an old journal.  It hasn't let him down so far, and the book says that there's a bridge there.  Apparently finding his way across is the last of the three challenges that most be overcome if one is to find the Holy Grail (which is what Indiana is looking for).  The clue for this challenge says, "Only in the leap from the lion's head will he prove his worth."  So our intrepid hero takes a deep breath and steps out into the empty air.

It's a great scene, and a great metaphor -- a true example of a real leap of faith.  He steps off the solid ground, the safe, the known, and into the quite possibly deadly unknown.  What happens next is what makes it such a great image:  as he steps off into the void, a bridge appears.

And that's the promise made by every religious tradition we humans have ever developed:  if you trust the universe -- God, the Spirit of Life, the Great Unknown, the Mother of All -- your trust will be met in kind.

Now, to be honest, it may not work out in the way you'd planned or hoped.  It may not even seem to work out at all.  In the prayer by Thomas Mertion I quoted last week, the Trappist monk said,

"I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death."

That's what makes it a true leap of faith.  Unlike with the fog enshrouded bridge, or the staircase that rises out of view, in a true leap of faith you don't know that there'll be anything to catch you, yet you go forward anyway.

This is not, however, an invitation to foolhardiness.  It's not about testing the universe, but, rather, trusting it.  There is a difference, and discerning that difference is something that a spiritual director could help you to do.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Taking a Leap of Faith

The phrase is used so often -- a leap of faith.  We're told that life -- and particularly the spiritual life -- requires us to take a leap of faith.  It's not entirely clear, though, just what people mean by doing that.  And it can be really hard to do something if you don't know, really, where you're going.

In his classic book Thoughts in Solitude, the Trappist monk Fr. Thomas Merton wrote a poem which I have always thought to be one of the most fully honest prayers I've ever heard.  (Alongside Meister Eckhart's famous assertion about the two word prayer "Thank you.")  Here's what Merton had to say:

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope I have that desire in all I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may nothing about it.  Therefore I will trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

I have no idea where I am going.  How's that for an honest prayer?  I have no idea where I'm going, which is true for all of us, isn't it?  Even when we think we know where we're going, the truth is that we really don't.  As the Scottish poet Robert Blake famously put it in this poem, "To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough" -- "the best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, / Gang aft agley."  That translates as, "the best laid plans of mice and men often go astray," and, as they say, ain't that the truth!

So ... where we know it or not, whether we're willing to acknowledge it or not, every choice we make is a leap of faith.  We never really know what'll come next.

Yet there are times when we know we're taking the kind of leap for which that phrase is usually used.  We can clearly see the chasm before us, and we can't see the other side.  Truth be told, we aren't even entirely sure that there is another side, or, if there is, that it's within jumping distance.

Bridges are good for this.   At the congregation I serve we have an annual "Bridging Ceremony" at which we recognize our graduating high school seniors, and mark their transition from "youth" to "young adult."  I've shared reflections about bridges, noting that bridges are good for getting us from here to there in our lives.  I've shown the picture of the Golden Gate Bridge at the top of this post, with its far side obscured by fog.  You know it's there, of course, yet from what your senses show you, you could be forgiven for not really knowing for sure.  This adds to the power of the bridge metaphor.  Not only can a bridge get you from here to there, not only can it provide a way to cross an perhaps otherwise uncrossable chasm, often you have to start across it on faith.

In the Jewish tradition there is a midrash on the story of the Israelites crossing the Red Sea to escape their Egyptian oppressors. It is said that when Moses raised his staff and commanded the waters to part, nothing happened.  At least that's what the Israelites saw.  Moses told them that the waters had parted, that there was now dry land they could safely cross to the other side, but it seems that he was the only one who could see it.  Out of the crowd, a child came to stand at the edge of the water.  She trusted Moses, and if he said the water had parted, she believed him even if she couldn't see it herself.  So she took a step, and felt the water sloshing around her ankles.  She took another step, and then another, yet all she could see, and feel, was the water reaching up to her knees.  With another step it was up to her waist.  In no time it was up to her chest, then her neck, the over her chin and just under her nose.  The people on the shore were shouting at her to stop her madness, but Moses encouraged her to go on, and she trusted Moses.  She took one more step, now even her nose was submerged, when suddenly everyone could see the waters parted and the dry land path Moses had told them about.  It was her faith, her willingness to take step after step without knowing for certain where those steps were taking her, that was the real miracle performed that day.

Having faith that the bridge -- or dry land -- is there even when you don't see for certain where it's taking you (or even if it is taking you somewhere) -- can be hard.  Acting on that faith is harder still.  Yet if you trust the bridge (either literal or symbolic), even though it's scary to do so, you can take that step.  Using a different metaphor, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "Take the first step in faith.  You don't have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step."  Here too, an encouragement to trust the bridge, or staircase, even if you can't see the whole thing.

My Lord God, I have no idea where I'm going, but I trust that I am not going alone.  However you may name or know the Love that Merton called "God," his prayer may well describe the heart of the spiritual journey.

Pax tecum,

RevWik