Your Life As A Play

“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…”

(From Shakespeare’s As You Like It)

I have always liked the con­cept of life as a play. The­ater is seri­ous busi­ness. Its come­dies and tragedies are the mir­ror of any soci­ety. Watch­ing an old movie is more than see­ing a story, it is tast­ing a cul­tural time gone by. For many, the the­ater is a key metaphor for life itself. One’s phi­los­o­phy of life is deter­mined by his or her cho­sen audience.

For every­day peo­ple, the audi­ence is their fam­ily, friends, and extended com­mu­nity. They play to a crowd of fickle crit­ics and the eas­ily bored. Their egos suf­fer by look­ing to the audi­ence for approval. Fif­teen min­utes of fame is not a ter­ri­bly great reward, but the hunger for affir­ma­tion is so severe that some­times the soul itself is sold for a sin­gle round of applause.

An exis­ten­tial­ist is a per­son on stage with no audi­ence. The voice echoes in an empty hall. What makes the play grand is play­ing it for the self alone. In it the soul might be dis­cov­ered through its angst — its anx­i­eties, hopes, and fears. Whether com­edy or tragedy, it is a yearn­ing for mean­ing in an empty and mean­ing­less place.

A Chris­t­ian is closer to the exis­ten­tial­ist than the every­day worldly per­son. For the Chris­t­ian, the audi­ence is the unseen God and the invis­i­ble “great crowd of wit­nesses” that have gone before. We do not play our part for the approval of a liv­ing audi­ence. They are merely equals. What counts for us are the cheers of the unseen. That takes the imag­i­na­tion of a deep faith. We write our scripts as we go, in the light of greater scripts we have known.

Sun­day morn­ing is part com­mu­nity the­ater, group ther­apy, tra­di­tion, and the secu­rity of belong­ing to a group of like-minded peo­ple. The actors are in the pews. The min­is­ter is merely the prompter. God is the audi­ence. We share the play with an eye toward the Invis­i­ble. We play before the eyes that can­not be fooled but loves us like a dot­ing par­ent at a children’s play.