CROSSING 125th STREET : I sometimes miss the elephants.

Twice a day I catch a bus across Harlem at 125th Street on my way between the Metro-North railway station and Commonweal's office on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Usually the trip takes thirty to forty minutes. Traffic is especially bad in the afternoon. It doesn't take much--a slight fender-bender or Bill Clinton's appearance at his new 125th Street offices--to bring everything to a halt. If you're rushing with a commuter's grim single-mindedness to catch a train, the delays can be maddening.

Recently, I found myself stuck in the worst traffic jam I had ever experienced. The bus didn't budge for twenty minutes. I stared obsessively at my watch as the departure time for my train came and went. (From my agitation, you'd think I'd missed the last shuttle to Mars.) The still line of buses, cars, and trucks stretched ahead for several blocks. With no prospect of relief in sight, the bus driver agreed to open the doors and several of us scurried out and started jogging toward the station. I soon saw a large crowd milling about at the intersection of 125th and Lenox Avenue. As I got closer, it became evident that the attraction was not an accident or police activity. People were happy, not distressed or angry. Then I saw why. No more than thirty feet in front of me, striding majestically down Lenox Avenue, was an elephant. A very large elephant. High atop this apparition was a pretty girl in a sequined outfit waving giddily to the crowd. It was, of course, a circus parade.

I love the circus, or so I'm always telling myself. What could be more magical than to find oneself face-to-face with an elephant in the middle of one's dreary commute? But I'm ashamed to say that I did not pause to enjoy the serendipity or the lovely incongruity of the moment. I was so intent on not missing the next train that I hurried across Lenox Avenue with barely a glimpse at the clowns and acrobats or at any of the other circus animals. Offered an escape from my daily grind, I turned it down. Shame on me.

Commuting is a pain in the neck and a deadening ritual. One gets psychologically locked into a schedule designed to preserve a few hours of free time at the end of the day. Fearful of forfeiting that free time, you leave little room for the unexpected. Worse, you instinctively resent any disruption. Yet it is precisely the unexpected and the incongruous that we need in a world where everything from our teeth and crow's-feet to our children's genes is increasingly measured against one aesthetic or utilitarian standard.

The circus, not unlike religion, can give us a taste of an alternative standard. Ten years ago or so our family started going to the Big Apple Circus. That excursion was often the highlight of the summer, and we would marvel over the show for weeks afterward. The tightrope walkers and trapeze artists were always thrilling, especially in the Big Apple's intimate setting. But perhaps the strongest memory I have is of a contortionist, who got himself in and out of a Plexiglas bottle not much bigger than a commuter's briefcase. The spectacle was fascinating and gruesome at the same time. How strange the human form seemed--like a changeling in a fairytale--when folded up as compactly as a Swiss Army knife. How extraordinary that someone could conceive of such a feat and develop the dexterity to achieve it. In the way he played with our sense both of being a body and having a body, the contortionist seemed a kind of mystic.

"Man is incongruent within himself," writes the sociologist Peter Berger in Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Walter De Gruyter). "Human existence is an ongoing balancing act between being a body and having a body....it is also possible that the sense of humor repeatedly perceives the built-in incongruence of being human." The circus, Berger adds in his discussion of the comic, presents an upside-down or counterworld, where the unnatural becomes natural and vice versa. Clowns, with their broad jokes and pratfalls, usher us into an alternative reality where status and accomplishment are mocked, human pretension deflated, and our common vulnerability celebrated. In Berger's terms, the circus is "an oasis of enchantment within the reality of modern rationality." And like all aspects of the comic, the circus can be a sign of transcendence. The "comic transcends the reality of the ordinary everyday existence; it posits, however temporarily, a different reality in which the assumptions and rules of ordinary life are suspended," Berger concludes.

Those rules were suspended when I encountered that elephant in Harlem. I wish such hints of the transcendent could be found more often, especially in church. I sometimes hear the tantalizing promise of incongruity, comic and otherwise, in the Scripture reading, but rarely in the sermon or elsewhere. Churchgoing, if not other aspects of our lives, should be more like coming face-to-face with an elephant at 125th and Lenox and less like commuting.