Clown of God- Study Guide

THE CLOWN OF GOD
By Tomie de Paola (Harcourt)

SUMMARY
THE CLOWN OF GOD takes place in the Italian town of Sorrento, where a young boy begs for
bread and juggles for pleasure. When a group of wandering entertainers comes to the boy’s town,
the boy begs to be included in the show as a juggler. Soon the boy is introducing the show with
his juggling and pleasing crowds wherever he performs.
Time goes on and the boy grows older. At one point in his travels, the young juggler meets two
brothers of a religious order who explain to him that his work is the work of God.
As the juggler, now elderly, decides to go home by journeying to the monastery where he can live out his days. Once there, he arrives in time for the celebration of the birthday of the Christ child. As a gift, the juggler performs for the child, who is seen in a picture on the lap of Our Lady. The child appears sad to the juggler and the juggler determines to make him happy. When the juggler finishes his performance, his heart stops beating. The brothers who come and find him discover that the Christ child is now pictured with a smiling face, holding one of the juggler’s golden balls.

DISCUSSION STARTERS
Ask about the character of the boy juggler. What do we know about him?
(Answers: He is poor, loves to juggle, happy at first, a good juggler.)
Draw pictures or write a "character sketch" of the juggler at the different times of his life.

Review basic reading comprehension information:
• What was the juggler juggling?
• Did the juggler ever miss?
• How did you feel when you read about the juggler performing?
• Would you like to be a juggler? Why? Why not?
• What helped the juggler in the story get better and better at juggling?  

POSSIBLE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS FOR DELVING DEEPER:
• What might have happened if he simply gave up when the man who ran the show said that he could not perform with them?
• How do you think he felt about performing for crowds of people?
• How do you think he felt when he heard the applause?
• What happened when the brothers told the juggler when he met them.
• Have you ever heard the expression planting seeds or sowing seeds of faith?
• Did you ever feel like giving up?
• What made you decide to keep trying?
• Are you glad you kept trying? Why?
• How did the icon help the juggler come closer to God (who is definitely NOT the icon itself)?
• What gift did the juggler give to God?
• Why does Tomie dePaula end the story with the smile and the ball?
• What gifts do you give to God?
• How might this be related to gift giving at Christmas?


Note to self:  What follows is the original version of part of this study guide before I revised it. A classic example of "tolerance".  This guided discussion (as is) leads children to believe that all religious beliefs are perfectly valid and paints them into the catagory of opinion. Bolding is my emphasis.

"Have children recall what the brothers told the juggler when he met them. Explain that people
have many different kinds of religious beliefs, and, the beliefs of the brothers in the story are just
one of them. Have children who care to share their own religious beliefs with others in the
group. Encourage children to think about the ways their own beliefs are similar to, and different
from, their classmates" 

source of original study guide: Weston Woods video.

You Are God's Original Masterpiece

H/T Archdiocese of Washington

I just read in the news an interesting story. It seems that a tornado recently went through junk yard. As you can imagine there was a horrible amount of junk whirling around in the air. But here’s where the story really gets interesting. It seems that the tornado swirled that junk together just right because as the wind died down all those banana peals, cans, broken pieces of pottery, stuffing from old mattresses springs, car parts etc all swirled together into a fully functioning 747 jumbo jet airliner with a filled fuel tank and fully equipped cockpit. There was even a logo emblazoned on the tail fin: “Tall Tales Airlines.”

“Ah,” you say, ” The story’s touching but it sounds like a lie!” And sure enough it is a tall tale. But how different is it really from what some atheists, and also certain evolutionists want us to believe about creation? I say some evolutionists because there are some forms of evolution that a Catholic may accept. For example a mitigated form of evolution that holds that things have evolved but God has guided the process. But what most atheists and evolutionists want you to believe is that evolution, in fact everything that happened after the big bang is a chance happening. that evolution is blind, nothing guides it. It just happened by accident, a chance coming together of certain forces and processes that has produced everything we see including ourselves. Again, they insist that the process is blind, it is guided by no outside intelligence. It all just happened on its own. Now if you believe that, then I have a 747 to sell you.

Now this world, even our own bodies are far more complex than a 747 Jumbo liner. And just as a mindless tornado can’t likely whip out a fully functioning 747 neither would a mindless explosion produce a fully functioning and orderly universe or even a fully functioning human person. The existence of these orderly and complex systems surely bespeaks an intelligent designer. If you landed on a planet in some distant galaxy and found in the sand a functioning watch it is not “unscientific” to conclude that some one with intelligence designed and made this for a purpose. You may not see any life on the planet now, but at some point there was intelligent life either living here or that visited here. But the point is that you would be on good scientific grounds to conclude that the watch pointed to an intelligent designer. Now I know that Science can’t formally call this designer “God.” We who believe do that. But science is on reasonable ground within its own discipline to conclude that an intelligence, a designer is indicated by the evidence. The stubborn refusal by many to do this seems more ideological than scientific. And they hold it with the kind of “religious” zeal they claim to be above. They call us the fanatics but I wonder who really is more fanatical. Who really is ignoring the evidence here? To a large extent I think that it takes more “faith” to “believe” that all this happened by chance or due to blind evolution than simply to believe that an intelligent designer set all this forth.

I’d like to give two examples from creation to illustrate just how intricate and multi-layered creation is and then pose the ask the question “Dumb Luck or Design?”

MAGNIFICENCE OF LIFE- Consider the awesomeness of the human body. Its chemistry is just as extraordinarily well tuned as is the physics of the cosmos. Our world on both sides of the divide that separates life from lifelessness is filled with wonder. Each human cell has a double helix library of three billion base pairs providing fifty thousand genes. These three billion base pairs and fifty thousand genes somehow engineer 100 trillion neural connections in the brain—-enough points of information to store all the data and information contained in a fifty-million-volume encyclopedia. And then after that, these fifty thousand genes set forth a million fibers in the optic nerves, retinae having ten million pixels per centimeter, some ten billion in all, ten thousand taste buds, ten million nerve endings for smell, cells that exude a chemical come-on to lure an embryo’s lengthening neurons from spinal cord to target cell, each one of the millions of target cells attracting the proper nerve from the particular needed function. And all this three-dimensional structure arises somehow from the linear, one-dimensional information contained along the DNA helix. Dumb Luck or Design?

RARE EARTH ! The earth on which we live and which, by God’s grace sustains our life is surely miraculous. Consider the following facts. The life support system we call the solar system has just the correct distribution of large and medium sized planets to have swept clean most of the space through which Earth must travel. There are thus few asteroids anywhere near our path! Further, large gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, “catch” comets in their gravitational fields and keep these comets from targeting earth. Our star, the Sun, is just the right size to consume its supply of hydrogen and produce energy at a rate that provided the time and conditions for life to form. Our orbit through space, at 93 million miles from the Sun, departs from a true circle by only 3 percent. Were it as elliptical as is the orbit of Mars, the next planet out, we would alternate between baking when closer to the Sun and freezing when distant. Earth contains just enough internal radioactivity to maintain its iron core in a molten state. This produces the magnetic umbrella that deflects an otherwise lethal dose of solar radiation. The volcanic activity driven by this internal heating is just adequate to have released previously stored subterranean waters into our biosphere, making them available for life processes, but not so much volcanism as to shroud our planet in dust. Earth’s gravity is strong enough to hold the needed gases of our atmosphere but weak enough to allow lighter noxious gases to escape into space. All this is balanced at just the correct distance from our star so that our biosphere is warm enough to maintain water in its liquid, life-supporting, state, but not so warm that it evaporates away into space. A just-right Earth with just the needed gravity, radioactivity, magnetic field, and volcanic activity to support life is located at just the correct distance from the Sun to nurture the inception and development of life…all the ingredients come together in just the way. Dumb Luck or Design?