Random acts of joy

A couple of nights ago we skipped the news and went to the circus instead. How frivolous and irresponsible was that at a time like this? the little voice counselling doom and despair kept telling me. How could anyone allow themselves to be distracted from the brutality going on around us? Places like Syria, Iraq and Nigeria, all of them controlled to a greater or lesser extent by the forces of evil at work in IS, al-Quaeda, Boko Haram and the various splinter groups, not to mention corrupt governments, working with them to a greater or lesser extent. Is it right to forget for a moment, by going to see Cirque Beserk at the Hackney Empire, that women and girls are being enslaved and that whole peoples are being subjected to a medieval nightmare?

Guilt and doubt are the great killers of fun because fun allows us to forget. It affords a time of respite. This is why banning fun is the essence of evil. It is also why poisoning religion by banning fun has long been the stock in trade of the evil one, and of his agents. The evil one, far from being an allegorical figure with horns and a pitchfork, is more like a virus which attacks us where we are most vulnerable, beginning with that aspect of human nature which we call spiritual, or religious, or our human consciousness. Consciousness or, to put it in religious terms, conscience, is where we differentiate between right and wrong, between what makes us fully human and what dehumanises or depraves the human spirit.

To begin with, and for most of us, the evil one works most effectively through counsels of doom and despair, accompanied by the voices of accusation and deception. In the very moment of full and uninhibited enjoyment of Cirque Beserk, I am accused of cowardice and moral turpitude as I sense the enemy questioning my enjoyment of such a distraction. Surely my attention should be fully taken up with the suffering and deprivation going on in the world? This private deception plays itself out within a wider psychological context. We are a chronically anxious society, deceived, as individuals, into thinking that if I do not hold up the world like Atlas, it will be overrun by these dark forces and it will all be my fault.

For this kind of deception to be effective, so that evil can take hold and do its malicious work, all signs of uncomplicated, selfless and at times even ‘pointless’ joy, or fun, need to be eliminated. It follows that joy, or fun, is probably the most powerful weapon we have at our disposal in the context of what is often referred to as ‘spiritual warfare’. Spiritual warfare is what all people of good faith, irrespective of their religion, are engaged in at present, even if they would not necessarily call it by that name.

Spiritual warfare centres on joy because joy is of the essence of creation itself. Evil, or the evil one, attacks the goodness of creation and of human beings by first destroying joy. If God is love, and if all things have their being in him, he rejoices eternally in their goodness. He ‘sees’ that they are good, to paraphrase the beginning of the book of Genesis. In this joy over the goodness of things, and of people, he also ‘comprehends’ darkness. In other words, he takes darkness into himself and transforms it through the love which is constitutive of his own being. Joy works through love and sustains all things. Human beings are entrusted to work God’s love into the world through joy – or what we call fun.

This is what happens in the circus. Circuses are contexts in which fun is given at great risk and at great personal cost. The woman hanging upside down on a rope some twenty feet above ground depends on the knots she will have tied herself and on the three pairs of hands holding the rope at the other end. The tumbling acrobat, if he misses his appointed landing spot, could be seriously injured, or even killed. We hardly dare watch him – and yet we do, not because we relish danger for its own sake but because we, like his colleagues waiting with a safety mat in case he misses his landing spot (I won’t spoil it by saying more), are willing him to be OK. We are also laughing with him and with his colleagues when he executes the act with flawless grace. The relentless joy of rave-type circus music, sustains the process and adds to the fun in the most surprising way.

And then there is the clown. His act is rooted in 17^th century Commedia del Arte, a popular form of street theatre in which human nature and human folly are portrayed through stock characters. The clown shows us to ourselves and gives us permission to laugh kindly at ourselves and at human folly. Laughing at ourselves without feeling guilty or afraid cures self deception and all the deceptions which we cherish about those who we fear or dislike. It allows love to happen.  

The clown is therefore one of the great healers of the human spirit. He is the Christ figure in our midst. He appears in every random act of joy, in shared and generous fun where all kinds of risks are taken for the sheer goodness and beauty of the moment, and in laughter that is entirely devoid of malice. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.