The Flying Rodleighs

The late devotional writer and Catholic priest Henri Nouwen compared the leap of faith we must make to follow Christ to the courage of a trapeze artist. This was something Nouwen knew about first hand. Nouwen traveled with the “Flying Rodleighs” for a time, drawing more than one spiritual lesson from the lives they lived. He said, like a high-flying trapeze artist, we must let go of the security we have had, to take hold of what is coming to us. And like a trapeze artist, we cannot do both at the same time.

Follow this line of thought. In the moment that a trapeze artist moves from one trapeze bar to the next, she must leave the relative security of holding on to something solid, something that has her confidence, and keeps her from falling. Then she must stretch out for the bar that is coming to her. In those milliseconds, which probably seem like an eternity, she is hanging there in mid-air, with nothing. She cannot go back to the security she has known. Nor can he speed the next trapeze bar to her. It is an act of faith.

The life of following and knowing Christ is lived in those moments between the trapeze bars. We cannot go back to our former lives, the way we used to believe, think, and live. We let those things go in order to follow Christ. But have we yet taken hold of Christ? No, we have not. As the Apostle Paul said in Philippians 3, “I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on.”

Faith is not the game of playing it safe. Faith is living without a net. Not because we love the adrenaline rush, but because we can’t go with Christ and stay where we are at the same time.