Thursday, July 3, 2014

Saint of the Month: Sir Ben Kingsley

I was seventeen years old, and my ambition was to become the greatest American-born classical actor since John Barrymore. You can imagine how thrilled I was when my high school drama class was invited to the state university during the visit of traveling actors from Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company. One of the actors, an up-and-coming thirty-three year old, had just scored a major success with his interpretation of Hamlet. We were invited to attend his lecture on acting that most challenging of roles.

I took my seat in the front row, pen and notebook at the ready to catch the pearls of wisdom from this new young talent. A thin fellow with a receding hairline wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and blue jeans stepped shyly onto the stage. He smiled at the assembled students, bowed slightly, and said “Good morning. My name is Ben Kingsley.”

I'd never heard of the guy. It would be another five years before the Anglo-Indian would give his Academy Award winning performance in the title role of Gandhi and leap to international fame.

He began his talk by drawing a diagram on a chalkboard. Two contiguous rectangles represented the open pages of a book. On the left page was a spiral. The end of the spiral crossed over onto the right page and terminated in a small dot.

“I saw this diagram in a book once,” the actor said. “It's a time-line of the history of our planet. Our earth is so old that if every mileometer on this line represented one million years of history, the line had to be coiled and coiled and coiled in order to fit into the space in this book. The tiny dot at the end represents the time human beings have existed on this planet. It had to be exaggerated in order to be visible on the page.”

He let the idea sink in for a few seconds—how very insignificant we all are when compared to the vastness of creation. “And yet,” he said, “in every tiny human life—in that blink of God's eye—there is the capacity to rise to great magnificent heights of love and joy and wonder and to sink to horrible depths of sadness, fear, and despair.”

In every life.

I never forgot that.

Every human life is an epic. In every human story there are the same, limited emotions—joy and love and fear and grief and desire and frustration and so on and on. If someone were to make a motion picture of the life of the most boring person you've ever met, you'd still watch that movie with fascination because those same passions exist in your life and in your story. Ben Kingsley explained that this is why people go to the theater—to see the phenomenal juxtaposition of our insignificance and our magnificence. That's also why I read the scriptures. I believe that everyone's story is found in the pages of sacred text, and that when we see ourselves we will also see our brothers and sisters and draw closer to God.

When I preach a funeral service—and I preach lots of funeral services—I always try to see the individual, specific human life as a gateway to eternal truth. In the stories of truck drivers and housewives are the same examples of love, forgiveness, sacrifice, thanksgiving, suffering, and faith which unite us with Jesus and the saints. When we look at these things, we are looking at the holy.

I don't know what Sir Ben, who was given the birth name Krishna Pandit Bhanji, would call this unifying humanity, but I call it a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

So thank you, Sir Ben, for being the first person to articulate the hermeneutic which has shaped my ministry. The very fact that words I heard from a man I did not know spoken thirty-seven years ago still influence my work today is itself a tribute to the majesty packed into a single “blink of God's eye.”

May you enjoy and fully experience your epic lives, my dears! Thanks again for reading.



PS-You never know what influence a small word or action may have. If you're Lutheran or Roman Catholic, why don't you join me in this small, silly act and sign my petition for Eucharistic sharing? I know it's a long shot, but so is winning the lottery—and your on-line signature doesn't even cost the price of a ticket! C'mon! Just click here.

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