Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

"I May Be the Only Person on the Face of the Earth Who Loves the Smell of Dung"
Thursday, February 22, 2007

When I was in the circus, a priest came to the lot on the opening day in Deland, blessed the tent, and held a service for all the performers. Periodically during the year, a chaplain would pitch up on the lot and sort of hang around. Maybe there would be a service, nothing major. The far more noticeable religious activity was the competition among two different evangelical pentecostal Bible study groups to recruit different members. One was started by the family of wire walkers, the other by a branch of the trapeze artists. I attended one of these, complete with tongues, and the scene is described in UNDER THE BIG TOP.

I was thinking about this today when my brother sent me an article from that Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a circus chaplain. (The author, John Blake, wrote a wonderful piece about me a few years ago, calling me "a modern-day Indiana Jones.") Says retired priest Newell Graham, who has seen The Greatest Show on Earth 26 times, "I may be the only person on the face of this Earth that loves the smell of dung."

The current chaplain, the Rev. Jerry Hogan,travels at least 60,000 miles annually, performing baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals.
"You see people take their gifts to extraordinary levels," Hogan says, "and it reassures your faith, whatever that may be, that there is something more to life than what we readily experience."
Hogan is assisted by two Roman Catholic nuns who not only travel with the circus, but also help put the shows on. Sister Dorothy Fabritze criss-crosses the country with Ringling in a truck that hauls a chapel. She pulls the show's curtains, steering the entrance and exit of each act.
The constant travels remind her of biblical journeys: Abraham moving to a new land; Moses leading his people out of Egypt.
"They've taught me a lot about leaving from one place to another, letting go and trust," Fabritze says. "A trapeze artist has to have a lot of trust. The performers are trusting the crew to get things in the right place in the right time. So there's a lot of family values, a lot of trust in what we do and that's, of course, scriptural and spiritual."
Graham says he admires the efficiency of the circus so much that he's driven to towns just to watch the crew unpack railroad cars. It puts him off when people refer to a chaotic situation as a "circus."
"Trust me. There is absolutely nothing chaotic about the circus, in front of the footlights or behind the footlights," he says. "If many churches worked as smoothly as the circus, they would be spiritual powerhouses."

Labels: Circus, The Bible in Pop Culture

Posted by B Feiler at 7:00 AM
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