All The World's A Stage

A Reflection and Poem for Pentecost 18                                     Thomas E Wilson, Guest Celebrant October 1, 2023                                                                           Holy Trinity Church, Hertford, NC

Exodus 17:1-7     Psalm 78:1-4, 12-16       Philippians 2:1-13           Matthew 21:23-32

All The World's A Stage

From the Gospel of Matthew for today we are given a parable there are two sons who are asked by their father to work in the vineyard. The first one answers “no”, but then he captures a deeper vision that his father had of him, and in that vision he goes to work in the vineyard. The second son says “Yes”, and he gets his father off his back. But he does not go to work in the vineyard because he is sure his father will not look deeper than the surface. How deep do we go in finding a vision of ourselves or others?

Shakespeare in his comedy, “As You Like It” has his character Jacques lament:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,

A half century ago, I was very involved in acting in plays. Like the parable, there are two different ways actors approach their craft. One is to say “Yes” and then not looking deeper into themselves,just memorize the lines and stage directions when giving a shallow performance of those lines. Many times, if they are cute or have a pleasing voice, they see no reason to go deeper. They have their own life to live. The other way is to go deeper in the actor's own psyche to find traits they might share in the characters they play. That way was the path I chose to take with characters.

When I played Willy Loman in Arther Miller's Death of a Salesman, I could identify with that small fear in my life that everything was on the brink of falling apart. Was my life making sense? I thought about the High School dropouts I was working with during my day job and how difficult it was to hold on to hope. The lines from Willy Loman's wife, Linda, in the play resonated as a cry for all of us to hold on to honor.

"I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."

In Miller's The Crucible, a story of easy duplicity by just going along, I could deeply identify with the character, John Proctor's, fear of losing his integrity at the same time covering up his own failings. In my day life, I was thinking about going to seminary and was more than aware of my moral failings. His line that cut to my heart was; “God does not need my name nailed upon the church! God knows how black my sins are!”

As Big Daddy, in Tennessee Williams', Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, reaching out to students at the local University up the street in a college production when I was a frustrated Rector of a Church in Georgia, I came to understand the having to let go of so much I wanted to control and the need to care about one another. It is Big Daddy who sneers: “The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he's dying don't give him pity for others.” or ““Think of all the lies I got to put up with! — Pretenses! Ain’t that mendacity? Having to pretend stuff you don’t think or feel or have any idea of?” I did not want that to be true of myself.

Playing those parts, brought me deeper to understand the shadows within myself that I was tempted to ignore. These acts of imagination were spiritual exercises wherein I attempted to channel the spirit of the character in the play and into my life as part of my being.

A couple weeks ago, I gave you an almost scene for scene of the 1942 Movie classic, Casablanca, and today I will introduce you to a 1947 movie, A Double Life, staring Ronald Colman, who won an Academy Award for the role he played as Tony, an actor. The actor is delightful when he does superficial comedies and is a success, but a producer offers him the lead in in a production of Shakespeare's Tragedy Othello where tragedy overcomes him as he becomes so enmeshed in the character who kills his wife in a jealous rage, that he ends up almost killing his own leading lady, who is also his own ex-wife, whom he still loves, and killing his girlfriend played by Shelley Winters and then finally killing himself as Othello does at the end of his play.

The movie, script writers Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, were also sending a message for actors not to take themselves too seriously. It was also a warning about Method Acting, which was gaining popularity at the time, where the actors brings their identifications with their own damaged psyches to the damaged psyches that infect the character.

When I came to the Outer Banks, I did not do a play for years but something came up and I had to do it. It was a production of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters, a two person presentation of these two persons, a man and a woman, sitting at a table five feet apart, not ever looking at each other, reading the love, and some not so love, letters and notes written to each other over the years. The other person in the cast was my wife Pat and we both learned how important it was to tell each other the truths in our feelings and to cherish the moments where we could freely and completely love each other. Doing that play with my wife was probably the best sermon I ever gave, or would ever give. Its message was important: that life is just too short to hold on to any grievances or to not tell someone that you love them.

When Jesus tells a parable, he is laying out a script for us to enter into a play, which can be either tragedy or comedy. We are urged to try out each part. What part of each character can we learn from? When have we promised that we would follow God's request but never seemed to get around to it because it would get in the way of life as usual? When have we said no to a request from our spiritual connection to our higher power, only to realize that our wholeness depended on doing the difficult deed? How has our habit of saying “Yes” or “No” been just a matter of habit? The parable of the Two Sons that Jesus tells is about how people, on hearing the invitation to join in helping the daily labor birth of the coming of the Kingdom of the Heaven each day. We make a decision either to just stay on the surface and go about their own self-absorbed activities and roles, or to make the decision to change our lives in loving our neighbors, extravagantly forgiving sins and sharing their lives with others to build a community of faith. Listening to any Parable becomes for the disciples, and for us who hear it 21 centuries later, an invitation to enter into a spiritual exercise of hearing the request to enter into a new life where our desires are not the center of our universes.

The Holocaust witness and writer Elie Wiesel reminded us :“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death.”

For Parishes of churches, the message seems to be about spending less time arguing about theology and more about demonstrating what a life of loving God and neighbor looks like in real life. A life where Prayer is not a bunch of lines we drone on about, but a way of living each moment as if we are in loving dialog with Creation where we are so aware of the blessedness of each moment before we even start to speak.

All The World's A Stage

Willy Loman is my friend living within me;

it would have nice if he were Errol Flynn

swilling more than healthy jiggers of Gin,

who asks nothing of me but egos to agree.

But he is not, and Willy's many fears live

within me to help understand my friend

and brother and then fully comprehend

the spirit who asks us to freely forgive.

Big Daddy shows up from time to time,

wanting to grasp and hold on to things

and people as fate as daily life brings

instead of seeing them as gifts divine,

meant to be treasured and shared

as signs our all loving God cared.