THE ACTS OF LIFE

by Forrest Church

 

December 2, 2001

 

 

—Maurice Maeterlinck,The Tragic in Daily Life.

 

My father was a politician, I am preacher, and my eldest son is an actor. We are all performers. The stage has worked its magic on each of our lives. My grandfather was a small businessman; his father weighed gold in the boom years following the gold rush. The stages on which they played their public lives (Church’s Sporting Goods, the Idaho State Assessor’s Office) were less public perhaps but no more intimate than the U. S. Senate chamber, All Souls Church, or the Williamstown Festival Theater. They too played their parts as best they could, sometimes poorly, sometimes well. They performed their given roles and shaped them. An introvert, my grandfather loved nothing more than to sit by himself on the porch at night and blow smoke rings at the moon. Yet he also loved the festive town displays on the fourth of July, taking particular pride in having supplied the fireworks. My great-grandfather went west as a young man to Idaho from Maine to seek his fortune. He spent his professional life counting other people's money. He also watched them lose it. The five of us each have a story, beginning as all stories do with a birth and ending with a name chiseled into stone, the name we share: Frank Forrester Church. Beneath our name, the story of our life unfolds during that little dash between dates on the marquis of our final resting-place.

When our play is ended, it becomes evident how unique each of our stories is, how rich in specific character and plot. French feminist and social philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, recognized this clearly when her mother died. As the parish priest intoned her mother’s name at its appointed place in the liturgy of the funeral mass, "Emotion seized me by the throat," she writes. "’Francoise de Beauvoir’: the words brought her to life; they summed up her history, from birth to marriage to widowhood to the grave. Francoise de Beauvoir–that retiring woman, so rarely named, became an important woman."

Today it sometimes seems that people are not completely sure they are important unless they appear on television waving a placard that says something like "John from Boise, Idaho" or "John 3:5," begging a moment of the cameraman’s attention and with it perhaps a taste of immortality. If they are on stage where everyone can see them, their life means something, and television offers the biggest stage of all these days. By stepping onto the stage one’s significance feels heightened; one is part of a larger story. The same thing that moved Simone de Beauvoir impels John from Boise: our innate human need to be known, remembered, understood, named. This need is not mere vanity, (though its expressions may be vain). Being human requires being a part of a story.

Our stories needn’t make headlines to be significant, even to be newsworthy. Nearing deadline and desperate for material, David Johnson, an Idaho newspaper columnist, turned this insight into a scoop. He didn’t need to study the wires or comb the files for a story with abiding human-interest value. "Everyone has a story," he wrote. However unnoteworthy this may seem, Johnson’s epiphany caught the fancy of Andrew Hayward, executive producer of the CBS news show, "48 Hours." Soon reporter Steve Harman and cameraman Les Rose were traveling around the country, interviewing subjects at random, and discovering that, indeed, everyone does have a story to tell. To choose his subjects, Hartman first tosses a dart behind his back at a map of the United States. Then Rose and Hartman go to the targeted town and flip open the local telephone book. Hartman closes his eyes, puts his finger on a number, and gives it a ring. Whoever answers (and agrees to participate) becomes the subject of a national television documentary. A regular feature on "48 Hours," this series surprised most industry insiders with its success. TV critic Linda Stasi is not one of them. She writes, "It’s not just Mariah Carey, the Clintons and Gary Condit who have interesting stories to tell. . . .The idea that ‘everybody has a story’ makes very good TV."

We know that now, don’t we. Since September 11, an appreciation for ordinary heroes has displaced our national obsession with celebrities, at least for a season. A new book on Madonna had a 300,000 print run; only fifty thousand copies were sold. And every morning in the New York Times, an entire page is devoted to the stories of ordinary people who lost their lives to the terrorist attack. That feature will continue running for a year and a half longer. That is how long it will take to run 5,000 obituaries. "Ordinary life" is an oxymoron, of course. There is nothing "ordinary" about life. But if there were such a creature as "Everyman," his life story (unobscured by special effects) would surely illuminate life’s meaning more tellingly than most of the human drama featured on tabloid and prime time TV. The misadventures of celebrities and action heroes (real and imaginary) have little bearing on our own actions and characters. Other people’s stories are instructive only to the degree that their problems and struggles resemble our own.

I was thinking about all this recently in the context of my pastoral counselling. Therapy, in most any form, is all about the telling and interpretation of personal stories. By presenting their life stories to another for examination, patients or counselees seek to discover who they are, what brought them to where they are now, and how they might proceed from here. All therapy can be summed up in three simple questions. "What really happened?" "What does it mean?" And, "What, if anything, can I do about it?" And all therapy has two underlying goals: 1) reconciliation–to those aspects of our story we would like to change but can’t; and, 2) revision–taking action to change those things we wish to change and can).

D. H. Lawrence believed that the goal of the individual–no different from that of the artist–is to "create that work of art, the living man, to achieve that piece of supreme art, a man’s life." Begin with character. Each of us is the protagonist in his or her own drama. And yet, every theatergoer knows that if the lead character in a play doesn’t develop over the course of its action, the play has no purpose. It is nothing but a wasted night of theater.

You might ask yourself, "Am I a bit player in all but my own drama; perhaps a columbine, unhappy in love, tears painted beneath my eyes; or maybe what they call in the theater ‘the fifth business,’ whose main purpose on stage is to explicate everyone else’s story? Is my character consistent or merely predictable? What motivates me? Can I, or anyone, follow the logic of my imagination? What are my obstacles and objectives? What is my raison d’etre? Do I even have one? What about a tragic flaw–do I have one of those? Am I fixed on the periphery of my own stage or a worthy protagonist–true to the essence of my character, yet changing and growing over the course of my life story? Does my character have spine? In short, do I participate fully in my own play’s rising action or am I instead a supernumerary, a spear-carrier, at best another’s second waiting in the wings?"

One can pose similar questions about the course one’s life is taking by examining its plot. In well-constructed theatrical plots, a through line can be drawn from beginning to end (by leitmotivs, a set of recurring themes, the steady and measurable development of character) investing the drama with coherence. In memorable drama, the action has movement and flow; it is neither fixed nor arbitrary. And, however it may be constructed, near the end of a well-made play, the plot soars toward a spire of meaning.

No life follows a linear plot from birth to death. The most directed life features tangents and subplots, encompassing in a single day everything from dramatic irony to farce. At the opposite extreme, a life without direction, driven haphazardly through a series of sequential, loosely connected episodes, has no recognizable shape. Should you wish to study such a play, attend the theatre of the absurd. Then examine the dramatic shape of your own life. Are you leading your life or following it? Is the story in which you are featured going anywhere? Is it dramatic or merely episodic? What are the central "problem" and major themes of your life? What is its point? Its design? Its entanglements? Does it make any sense?

Should your answers to these questions prove less than satisfactory, don’t throw away your tiara. After all, you too serve in the creative team that is scripting your drama, with principal responsibility for developing your own character. You can’t make your life problem free, but you can script it in such a way that it is solution driven. How we co-script our drama makes a world of difference in how it plays. This is true whatever scenes the fates may cast us in. Crisis is not something that befalls us. In Greek the word, "crisis," means decision. Whenever life springs a trap for us, events follow (at least in part) from the decisions we then make. How we respond drives plot as often as it builds character. Here, as in all great art, imagination tells the story. A strong imagination carries events, it doesn’t succumb to them.

However well we script our part, much will go for naught if we play it poorly. As the principal actor in our own production, we are cast in the lead, if not always a starring, role. Should the lead underact or overplay, the finest drama becomes a shambles. Much of life is improvisational theater, but years of untutored practice may do nothing to improve our performance. On the other hand, great acting teachers offer devices by which anyone, not just an actor on the stage, can improve his or her performance. They teach concentration. (How often do you live fully in the moment?) They develop methods for capturing a character’s true feelings and presenting them with authority. (Have you penetrated the core of your character? Do you act with conviction and passion?) To do this, they employ tricks like emotional recall and total involvement. (Can you draw on your deepest emotions? Do you express your feelings authentically?) They also stress the importance of flow (tempo, rhythm and pacing), recalling Shakespeare’s observation that, "The man that hath no music in himself . . . the motions of his spirit are as dull as night." (Do you have music in you? Or poetry? Or fire?) Masters of the theater teach us to hit the mark.

Co-actors are essential to our play as well. Think about the company that shares the stage with you. Is the ensemble successful? Are you giving one another your best? The acting teacher, Stanislawsky, stressed the importance not only of getting into one’s own character, but also of getting into the characters with whom one is in dialogue. One term for this is "connection:" understanding what makes others tick; sensing what they feel and why; knowing what they think. More than any other art form, theater is collaborative. To act successfully is to respond, by trained intuition, to what another character is pondering or suffering. Such engagement is not reserved for psychodrama. It is true for every sort of theater, excluding only moments devoted to monologue. Such moments can be illuminating as well, but in life all creative interchange is dialogical. Viewing life as collaborative theater, the art of living is the art of dialogue. If the company is good (its dialogue both meaningful and sustained), our play stands a much better chance of being successful than if the company is not. In this case, our company is not made up solely of visitors. Every protagonist is a member of the troop.

In the final act of almost every play, one of two things happens. Either the characters are united by actions and events or permanently estranged from one another. Whether figuratively or literally, most plays end either in marriage or death. That our personal dramas all end in death is not the problem that great playwrights pose in their fifth acts. They question whether our death will turn out to be a meaningful one. We too might ask (at any point in the course of our drama), "Am I living in such a way that my life will prove worth dying for?" If we enter into union with others it may; if we are estranged, or disengaged, it will not.

Scientist and author Catherine Bateson writes, "The individual effort to compose a life, framed by birth and death and carefully pieced together from disparate elements, becomes a statement on the unity of living. These works of art, still incomplete, are parables in process, the living metaphors with which we describe the world." If our story speaks to everyone’s condition, not just our own, it may not turn out to be great theater, but it will surely be the stuff of great theater. Whatever twists the plot may take, if it leads at last to the catharsis of union rather than to the catastrophe of estrangement, when the curtain falls, our play will end well.

In closing, I invite you to think about the theater of worship, where we are right now. It is a different kind of theater. Superficially, it might appear that the preacher is the actor, God, perhaps, his or her prompter, and you, the congregation, the audience. But that is not how the theater of worship works. In truth, the preacher is the prompter; the actors are sitting in the pews; and God is the audience. It is you who are on center stage, not I. Standing in the wings, I serve, at best, as your prompter, reminding you of lines you may have forgotten. It is your play. You are the actor. And God is watching, a sacred presence filling the house, waiting to see how your play will turn out.

Amen. I love you. May God bless us all.

 

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