Petite Soeur Priscilla et le funambule (rough draft.)

April 18, Big Bear Lake.

Little Sister Priscilla was born in the circus. Taking the vows of the Little Sisters of Jesus Catholic congregation did nothing to stop her from spending her life in it, on the contrary.
It is a familiar story for circus people: her mother met her father, a circus performer, and joined the circus. He was from a Swiss circus family, the Bühlmanns, a high wire artist. Un funambule. He died after falling during a performance where he rode a motorcycle on the wire when Priscilla was just four. She was born in 1931 in Morges, in Switzerland, near Lausanne, because that's where the circus was at the time. Priscilla was up on the high wire with her mother before she was born. "Mom walked the high wire with me in her belly up til when she was seven or eight month pregnant," she said.
After her father's death her mother took her and her one-year-old sister to live with her grandmother in Lausanne. She didn't have a profession so she worked as a waitress. When Priscilla was a teenager she wanted to go to boarding school but was refused entrance when it was found out that she was from a circus family. She took to hiding her background after that, and distancing herself from circus life. But destiny had something else in mind, or the Lord did, she would say. She joined the congregation of the the Little Sisters of Jesus in 1953 and took her final vows in 1961. "I wished to work in a factory," she said, but the Little Sisters found out about her family and Little Sister Magdeleine, the founder of the order, encouraged her to go back to the circus. Little Sister Magdeleine, or Magdeleine Hutin, as she was known before taking the vows, founded the Little Sisters of Jesus following the path of Brother Charles de Foucauld, a monk who chose to live an eremitic life among Muslim desert tribes in North Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century and founded a spiritual family from which sprung several orders within the Catholic church in France.
Little Sister Priscilla joined the Little Sisters at Circus Knie in 1961, and she's been on the road ever since. After working with several circuses in Europe she came to the United States following Little Sister Magdeleine's wish to see the sisters increase their presence on other continents. The Little Sisters order has about 1,200 members. It is based in France but is present around the world, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, including Iraq. There was already a group in the U.S. and Little Sister Joelle had expressed the desire to work in a circus; Little Sister Priscilla joined her in Washington D.C. in 1968. They've been on the road together in the U.S. for 28 years.
Little Sister Priscilla turns 75 this year, and she and Little Sister Jo, who's in her sixties, decided not to travel full-time anymore. From now on they will work with a circus for a while then take the rest of the year to go into retreats and stay with different Little Sisters' congregations in the U.S.
Little Sisters Priscilla and Hélene-Renée left yesterday. We didn't say goodbye, they don't like to. We'll see each other down the road, here or there, in the circus.

Little Sister Priscilla in front of Circus Chimera (April 1.)