Some of you followed my SAD journey in Advent last year. I found myself on Facebook daily pouring out the pain and discomfort of living Advent and Christmas as a single person. I was surprised by what that diary evoked in me and others. And when Boxing Day came, I felt different. More ready for my life.
I used what I’d learned through December in my work. Training churches in the practice of culture change, I told them how a public lament of my circumstances had catalysed newness in my self. Now I regularly invite congregations and individuals to think of what they have lost, and to encourage them to engage in some form of communal lament. I encourage church leaders to develop acts of liturgy to help with this. Apt liturgy takes context seriously and allows a specific loss to be acknowledged. I’ve led a couple of bespoke services for this purpose – lamenting baby loss, infertility and childlessness, and violence against women.
What I didn’t expect for myself, coming just after Easter, was a completely unforeseen form of newness in my life: clowning.
It came (almost) from nowhere.
I’ve had an interest in physical theatre since studying the Russian dramatic innovator, Vsevolod Meyerhold, as part of my degree. And if you look at my Facebook page you’ll see my profile photos often show me looking rather absurd. I appear with an arrangement of party hats on my head like a shiny stegosaurus or with a plum on my nose or toothpaste decorating my chin. Friends could probably tell you of moments when I’ve fooled around in public, causing them embarrassment. So perhaps I have been carrying a flattened, hidden-at-the-back-of-the-wardrobe-of-the-heart clown inside, afraid to allow her full dimensionality in my life.
I bought a book recently by a woman whose husband died suddenly in mid-life. She found herself plunging unexpectedly into an intense relationship with fungi and finding surprising new life energy there.
Newness coming out of left-field shouldn’t surprise followers of Jesus, specially when it follows a painful ending that’s been publicly offered at least partly for the sake of the wider community.
But it seems there’s no limit to the ways God comes out of left field. A clown course at RADA. Me. Aged 59 and a half. Open that wardrobe door.
I hear you. I seem to have been a closet pluralist. And until I tried it on for size, I had no idea how natural and easy it would feel.
Although, on reconsideration, I don’t like the term ‘pluralist’! It seems to still suggest that I have to ‘do’ something. I prefer to just stand for surrender to God, freedom and the essence of Christianity. There is nothing more in the wardrobe! Interesting to look, though! Of course a clown is more an identity than a stance, in my thinking. Identity? – I guess I have my neurodiversity – that seems to be a good ticket to freedom! Glad I found that one in the wardrobe!