Sacred Clown Wedding

Picture, if you will, an enchanting arboretum brimming with colorful flowers and other bright growing things. It’s a glorious sunny autumn day. A bride and groom are surrounded by admiring friends and family. A sacred ceremony is about to unfold for two loving people. It’s also, coincidentally, the 799th anniversary of Rumi’s birthday. Music and poetry are flowing from the loudspeakers. It’s a perfect wedding in every way.

Except for this: one of the Rumi readers is Patch Adams.

Here’s how it goes. A Russian friend starts things off with a powerful love song which nobody understands, it being in Russian, but which moves everybody to tears by the passion of the performance. Other musicians contribute songs. Inspiring selections of Rumi poetry enliven the proceedings.

About halfway through this idyllic ceremony, Patch gets up to read. He’s dressed, as always, in full technicolor clown regalia, with half of his long gray hair dyed blue. If you saw the movie Patch Adams, you begin to understand the force of outrageousness that Patch is. (Remember how he mooned the crowd at his graduation?)

Patch is tall (6 feet 6), so when he stands to recite, I start to adjust the microphone up to his mouth. He asks me to leave it aimed at the middle of his chest. He then launches into an emotional reading of a 30-line Rumi masterpiece (a translation by Coleman Barks), of which I will reprint only the first five lines here:

Love has taken away my practices and filled me with poetry.
I tried to keep quietly repeating no strength but yours, but I couldn’t.
I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
But who can stand in this strong wind and remember these things?

As soon as the line about the “strong wind” comes out, Patch (or some unknown accomplice) triggers a piece of poetic license hidden in his chest pocket: an electronic whoopee cushion. Suddenly we’re serenaded by a long, loud, and tonally impressive blast of flatulence, fully amplified and resounding through the arboretum.

Some of us laugh, some don’t, and pretty much everybody looks shocked. Especially the bride’s relatives from assorted small towns in Iowa. After the tittering dies down, Patch waits a second then continues reading. Not content to leave it to chance that anybody somehow missed what just happened, the whoopee cushion erupts three more times during the poem.

Those of us who know Patch chalk it up to Patch being himself. If you invite Patch to be in your wedding, you expect the unexpected and take what you get. Those who don’t know him, I have no idea what they think. I’m reasonably sure it’s not what they signed up for. I’m also certain they’ll be talking about it for a long time. Especially when they forget to take their Beano.

Patch is a dead-on personification of the archetype of the Fool. The Fool’s job is to shake us up. He flings us into new perspectives by blasting us out of our comfort zones, our preconceived notions, our common attachments and habitual responses. The Fool reminds us that what we perceive as universal order is always able to morph into chaos at any moment. God is a magician with a sense of humor. Laughter is a healthy response to the burst soap bubble of our expectations.

The Fool — the Trickster — has a long, historic tradition in hundreds of cultures. The Hopi have their Sacred Clowns, who are allowed to disrupt even the most holy ceremonies with their unruly and sometimes funny behavior. (Not every time, of course, but periodically.) St. Francis used to walk around naked in public. Rumi offended dogmatic religious authorities by dancing and whirling in the markets, spouting stream-of-consciousness poetry about God as Love. The medieval court jester spoke dangerous truths to the king in jokes and riddles. The Japanese Kihune pokes fun at the overly serious, at greedy merchants, and at self-obsessed Samurai. Tom Sawyer, Brer Rabbit, and Leprechauns all have elements of the Trickster.

The Navajo have a wonderful tradition called the “First Laugh Ceremony.” When a baby is born, he/she is watched over constantly by a member of the family until the day of the child’s first laugh. That day marks the birth of the child as a social being, and a celebration is organized by the person who witnessed the laugh. This strikes me as beautiful, meaningful, and if the child happens to be a male, way more fun than circumcision.

There is an indigenous creation myth — I forget which culture — where the Great Spirit actually farts the world into existence. (One is tempted to think of this particular God as a male. Possibly that’s a sexist remark, but most of my ex-girlfriends would agree.) Either way, a creation story like that pretty well answers the question of why God allows suffering.

I don’t know for sure how the bride and groom feel, but I have no doubt that all who were present have this wedding preserved in vivid holographic sound and color in their memory banks. I would have treasured it regardless, because of my love for the people involved, the beautiful day, and the connection with Rumi. Thanks to Patch, however, it will always have a special flavor.

But I’m not sure I’ll invite him to my wedding.

© 2008 Greg Tamblyn, your friendly neighborhood Motivational Humorist.