Becoming Fools for Christ

Clowning as an aid to holy ritual and service

On the darkened stage, a white-faced clown with bulbous nose, orange woolen wig and baggy red-and-white costume sits at a table reading a large book marked Bible. He eats from a box of popcorn as big as a milk crate. Beside him two mimes in blue leotards do their silent best to act starved. When the clown notices, he merely makes the sign of the cross and calmly resumes reading--and eating. Now a large banner unfurls upstage saying FEED THE HUNGRY! At last the clown gets the message and hands small bags of popcorn to the mimes. They give the bags to two members of the audience, with gestures to indicate that each is to put a piece of popcorn into the mouth of his neighbor and embrace him, then pass on the bag so the neighbor can do the same. Soon the audience of 200, nearly all dressed as clowns, is busy munching and embracing.

The audience has just completed a two-mile parade through the Garden District of New Orleans, to the beat of 63 Dixieland tunes belted out by the ten-piece Olympia Brass Band. Children gawked and grownups dropped their weekend chores to watch. One woman clown clad in green and white greeted a bemused bystander with a blue balloon and a smacking kiss on the cheek. Another clown in a striped T shirt and psychedelic wig paused from time to time to give lawnmowers, car windshields, even a motorcycle policeman's helmet a few flicks with his bright red feather duster. Along the way, the clowns stopped off at two hospitals, a mental institution and a nursing home, where they dispensed balloons and hugs to sad-eyed children and old people.

It was not a bizarre come-on for Barnum & Bailey. Not at all. The 200 clowns were a congregation. The popcorn pass-along was part of a two-hour Christian Communion service conducted entirely in mime and gesture by the Rev. Floyd Shaffer, the red-and-white clown, who is really a Lutheran minister from Roseville, Mich. Both services and parades were among the highlights of a weeklong workshop on the use of clowning, mime, puppetry and dance in Christian worship and ministry that attracted some 350 people to the campus of New Orleans' Loyola University. More than 400 attended a second gathering earlier this month in Ithaca, N.Y. The participants spent their time learning how to juggle (concentration is more important than coordination), sew costumes and master the techniques of clown makeup (lots of powder after applying each color prevents smears). They also studied ventriloquism and went to serious lectures by the leading clerical exponents of Christian clowning. "We estimate that about 20% of the participants are ministers or priests," says Tom Nankervis, director of the United Methodist Church's Office of Communication Education, one of the agencies sponsoring the workshop. "And nearly all the people here are very active in their church."

The clergy clowns find a theological justification for their unusual ministry in the injunction of St. Paul to the Corinthians to become "fools for Christ's sake" because God has "made foolish the wisdom of the world." They discern multilayered analogies between the clown and Christ: the clown's joy in living and mimed delight in simple things, like the scent of a flower, for instance, recall Jesus' command to "consider the lilies of the field, how they grow." The simplicity and childlike persistence of the clown can have a special meaning for Christians. "The clown refuses to accept the limits of the possible," explains Tim Kehl, a professional clown and magician who is also a United Church of Christ minister. "A clown will insist on riding a bicycle whose wheels are out of kilter or trying to walk a slack tightrope. Sooner or later, he will succeed--to the great delight of the audience. The Resurrection of Jesus is the supreme example of God's refusal to accept the limits of the possible." Through love, the clown, like Jesus, can transform the ordinary into the sacred. At the Last Supper, ordinary bread and cheap table wine became eternal symbols of Jesus' love and sacrifice. At Pentecost, a group of illiterate fishermen were turned into inspired preachers who could speak to every man present in his own language. "Isn't that Christ's message," asks Shaffer, "that even ordinary people can become divine through his love?"

Clowning for Christ advocates point out that their approach is not a new gimmick but the revival of an ancient tradition. Clowns often had an important role in medieval church services: they played the part of "holy interrupters," popping up to illustrate a theological point through mime, magic or even mockery. Gradually, however, they began to satirize the church and secular society. "This did not make clowns very popular," Shaffer notes. They fell out of favor with the church and eventually were declared satanic. Thereafter clowns kept to the secular world of the circus--at least until their current revival.

Today there are 3,000 clown ministry groups in the U.S. who put on big noses and suits of many colors in order to serve God. Yet it was only seven years ago that Methodist Minister Bill Peckham organized one of the earliest clown ministries in Elkhart, Ind., among the young people of his parish. Calling themselves the Holy Fools, they began visiting hospitals, mental institutions and nursing homes, where they fanned out to chat with individual patients, occasionally performed short skits or magic tricks and made balloon sculptures. Often they just talked quietly with a patient, held or hugged him. As one clown explained: "Sometimes when we don't say so many words, the Word comes through more clearly." They had such success at reaching out to withdrawn, sick and lonely people that the idea quickly spread. Peckham now estimates the number of Holy Fool groups alone at 2,000 of the total 3,000. There are even Roman Catholic clowns. Says Father Nick Weber, a Jesuit priest and a clown whose ministry is an itinerant sidewalk circus: "If you make believe, the chance for belief is heightened."

Precisely because the clown is so childlike and unthreatening, he invites confidences. In a clown's presence people feel free to admit how vulnerable they are, how much they need help. "We've seen some remarkable things happen in mental health centers, where people previously unable to trust another human being have responded to a clown," Peckham told TIME Correspondent Steven Holmes. The Holy Fools also find that when it comes to liberation the clown costume works both ways. Dressed as clowns they feel free to engage in behavior that would normally be beneath their dignity, even acutely embarrassing.

As a disarming adjunct to ritual, clowning can be dramatically effective. It also has broad usefulness in therapy and pastoral work. But in a country that tends to turn everything into show business, anyway, it has some dangers and drawbacks. In liturgy it may be inappropriate to the solemn mysteries of Christian teaching. Besides, as Shaffer warns, a clown for Christ may get lost in show biz, forgetting that the message is what matters. Adds Peckham, unwittingly echoing what the clowns of the Middle Ages learned: "It is very tempting just to be in the spotlight, to have applause."

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