Guardian angels.

March 31, Kingman, Arizona.

Sister Priscilla just came by with the news that Sister Jo's mother is getting sicker.
Jo's going to have to stay with her a while longer; she's been away from the circus more than a week now. Her mother is 89 and had been sick, and now she's developed pneumonia so everybody is really worried. On her way out Priscilla told me to keep Jo in my thoughts.
I can't pray for her, but I'll think of her with all my heart.
The Little Sisters have been traveling with the circus since the beginning of the season, and will be with us until the end of May. As I mentioned in an earlier posting it was love at first sight between Sister Priscilla and I when we met, back at the Carson and Barnes Circus in 2000, at the same time I met Fridman. The odds were against us: I'm a confirmed agnostic, and was raised in the most unreligious environment possible in the most unreligious country on earth. France is as atheist as they come, and my Dad went to a Jesuit school and came off hating them and anything having to do with religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular with a passion. I don't define myself as an atheist only because I have no definite answers. So by culture as well as nature, if I can say, I've always been suspicious of religion in general and the Catholic church in particular.
And then there was Priscilla.
Sisters Pricilla and Jo are Catholic. They belong to an order called the Little Sisters of Jesus. It was founded in 1939 by a French nun called Little Sister Magdeleine when she was working with nomads in Algeria. This nomad beginnings left their mark on the congregation, and they have a special connection to nomadic people of all kinds, Gypsies, carnival people or circus people. They live and work in groups of three or four "among the world's poor and marginalized, somewhat as we would imagine Jesus having lived in Nazareth," as Sister Priscilla wrote in a testimony she gave me. Contrary to most other orders they don't proselitize at all; rather they are, as they define themselves, a contemplative presence of the Church, "crying the Gospel through their life."
This is what I like about them, too: the honesty of their position. Sister Priscilla and Jo, who have been traveling together in the United States for many years and with various circuses, have worked cooking, selling tickets, ushering people, sewing, brushing animals, among other things. Other sisters work in factories, as maids, clerks, etc. And, at least from the example Sisters Priscilla and Jo give, always a humble life, and always a caring presence.
As I said in an earlier posting, they are the guardian angels of the circus. I'll be thinking of Jo.