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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