Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost - August 25, 2024
Father Vincent Pizzuto, Ph.D.
St. Columba's Episcopal Church
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18 + Psalm 34:15-22 + Eph 6:10-20 + Jn 6:56-69
Grace to you and Peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I speak to you today in the name of the + Three-in-One and One-in-Three. Amen.
Yesterday, as many of you know, I made my West Coast debut as a Shakespearian thespian, in my cameo appearance as Friar Francis in “Much Ado About Nothing;” a performance which I am relatively certain will launch me into the next phase of my professional career as the latest Hollywood heart throb.
The truth of the matter is, I blessedly have fewer lines in the entire play than it takes to recite the Nicene Creed. But it is a role that, I have come to learn, is pivotal to the entire plot and storyline. Not having acted on stage since my college years in the 1980’s, I have to confess I was conflicted when Sharron first asked me to consider my involvement in Shakespeare this summer. Her invitation came just one month after my mother’s passing. But I am glad I said yes. It has brought back tender memories of when, having taken a number of leading roles in college, my parents would make the schlep from Northern New Jersey to St. Bonaventure University in Olean New York, to see my performance.
In one such performance, I took the leading role of Archbishop Thomas Becket in T.S. Elliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral.” During the scene in which Becket is assassinated by sword, my father let out an unmistakable snort as he tried to suppress his laugher. My mother, I would learn later, chided him with an elbow to his ribs, but too late! I had already caught his giggles and had to die with my face turned away from the audience in order to conceal the irrepressible smile that was spanning my face. There can be no re-takes on stage. You only get to die once.
But over the past several weeks, what has been most rewarding is not just the time I spent on stage (which is rather brief) but the time I have spent backstage getting better acquainted with the other local actors– neighbors who have real lives and personalities that differ significantly from that of their Shakespearian characters. As we all worked together to own our respective roles and to learn how to play off each other’s energy while onstage, I began to feel a closer bond with real people behind the characters we played. Sharing life stories with some, exploring questions of faith and politics with others. And this has, by far, become one of the most rewarding aspects of this whole endeavor. The play is but the tip of an iceberg of the whole experience that is “Much Ado About Nothing.”
If I am to be honest, when I was first called to rehearsal, I felt like I might best serve the larger cast by simply laying low. Don’t ask Sharron too many questions, do what you’re told – she has much bigger fish to fry in directing, choreographing, and managing the lead actors. My role wasn’t significant enough to warrant her attention when it was plain to see how much she needed to accomplish in the big picture in so short a time. Over the ensuing weeks as I daily turned to the rote task of memorizing my lines in the privacy of the vicarage, I was reflecting on the burgeoning little community being forged right here in my own backyard by our collective endeavor. And I could not help but contrast a film Fernando and I saw in 2008, entitled, Synecdoche, New York (not Schenectady NY – but in fact a play on that name where the movie was filmed).
Synecdoche, New York is an American psychological drama, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and staring Philip Seymour Hoffman as an ailing theater director who works on an increasingly elaborate stage production for over 17 years with no audience, and whose extreme commitment to realism begins to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. Between backstage, onstage, and offstage. It was an abstract, self-indulgent film, and extremely hard to track. In fact, I thoroughly I hated the movie. At one point, as it was getting late, we turned it off and went to sleep not realizing the movie had no more than 30 seconds to its end. When Fernando left for work the following morning, I decided to attempt to finish it, and resumed watching the last 30 seconds. Shockingly in that brief time, the meaning of the entire film seemed suddenly to fall into place. Its message:
Each of us thinks of ourselves as the star
in the theatrical performance that is our life.
But nobody’s watching.
As I thought back on the film through this telling lens it revealed a disturbing truth about our collective potential for self-absorption, ego-centrism, and self-importance. We all play the lead role in the movie that is our lives…but nobody’s watching. They are all off playing their own lead roles in a movie the rest of us are not watching.
And suddenly my tiny little role as Friar Francis in “Much Ado” came into sharp relief because I appreciated for the first time that his small role is much more reflective of the role each of us really does play in the grand scheme of things. For, though small, it is nonetheless his voice that marks a pivotal moment in the play, as he introduces the ruse that will ultimately prove Hero’s innocence of the accusations of adultery that are being unjustly leveled against her.
In a plot by her family’s political enemies, Hero’s fiancé, Claudio, is tricked into believing she has been having an illicit love affair with another man. Instead of separating from her quietly, as he might have, the drama is intensified when he decides instead, in his hurt and rage, to shame her publicly as the two stand before one another on the day of their wedding ready to exchange vows.
The light and jovial atmosphere that permeates the stage at the opening of the scene, quickly turns dark. The mayhem that follows is among the most violent and tense scenes of the entire play as Hero becomes the innocent victim of a plot to destroy her reputation, and with it, that of her entire family. Insulted by her fiancé, abandoned by her mother, and physically abused by her father, she is tossed to and fro, stripped of her dignity, lambasted with accusations of being a prostitute, and publicly humiliated before friends, family, and church.
Yet it is the friar, Francis, whose obscure role throughout the play nevertheless in this moment sees into her heart when no one else can. His insistence to Leonato, Hero’s father, that she has essentially been “left for dead” by such a public humiliation, is not to be taken lightly. Accusations such as those made against her, in the time of Shakespeare would have destroyed her entire life, shunning her from public view forever, and giving her little choice but to live her life hidden away forever in a cloistered convent, repenting for a sin she did not commit.
In a tender moment, after most of the characters have either stormed off stage in anger, or staggered-off beset by grief, the friar, as he attempts to encourage Hero, sees her wedding veil, which had been torn off by Claudio, still lying on the ground. The ensuing silence as he bends low to salvage the veil, starkly contrasts the preceding violence and pandemonium of the entire wedding scene. With poignant symbolism, he retrieves the veil, as much as he retrieves Hero’s dignity, integrity, indeed her maiden virginity – all which had all been stripped of her just moments earlier. He gently hands it back to Hero with a tender blessing of hope and encouragement.
When all else fails her, it is the church who stands by her and the church who sees her. And the church who reflects and magnifies her innocence to the world. As such, Hero becomes, a kind of Christ figure who must “Die to live” as the friar tells her. As they exit the stage the plan is in place: They will feign Hero’s death to evoke sympathy rather than judgement from the world, until she is able to emerge again, restored, indeed unveiled as the resurrected Hero in the final wedding scene.
As I came to better appreciate what Shakespeare has done through this little character of Friar Frances, I began to realized I owed it to the director and to the entire cast of lead actors to get it right. I realized that for Shakespeare, my small role really did matter. And that small though it may be, I owed it to everyone on stage to play it big. To play it with all the sincerity and character development I could muster. Because small though it was, the lead actors depended on the degree of sincerity and conviction with which I played my part.
The role of Friar Francis, it seems, is the antidote to the delusional self-absorption of Seymour Hoffman’s role in Synecdoche, New York. And in that realization the theological less I had learned so long ago in graduate school emerged again with new clarity. I recall our professor probing the class about who had the leading role in Matthew’s infancy narrative versus that of Luke. It was conventional wisdom to understand Jospeh, with his dreams of angels and journey’s to Egypt as having the lead role in Matthew. And Mary with her Magnificats and journey’s to Elizabeth as having the lead role in Luke.
Our professor playfully gave us just enough exegetical rope for us to hang ourselves before he came out with his punchline. Here the conventional wisdom failed. We were all wrong. Rather, he reminded us: God, and God alone, was the Lead Actor in both Infancy Narratives – indeed in the whole of scripture. In the great providential unfolding of divine love in the Incarnation, both Mary and Joseph were little more than side-kicks. Two-bit parts which they were nonetheless asked to play with all the fervor they could muster. As so it is with all of us. Even those who, in our time, or any time, seem to play leading roles on the world stage, are inevitably and ultimately forgotten, erased from our memories in the vicissitudes of time. How many ancient Emperors of Rome can you name? How many Pharaohs of the once great and might Egypt? How many kings who followed in the wake of David? Or how many of the Twelve Apostles?
This lesson marked a memorable moment of theological truth for me. Because in the grand scheme of the great Theo-drama of cosmic history we are, all of us, much more like Friar Francis than Seymour Hoffman. Much more a two-bit part than a leading role. Like the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke there can ever only be one leading role and that belongs to God, the very essence of LOVE that lay at the heart of the universe, a Love whose providential care unfolds bidden or unbidden in the life of each of us as we learn to play as best we can our two-bit parts in the history of salvation. In comparison to the expanse of eternity, all of us are relegated to the brief roles we play in the fleeting fragility of time.
There are, no doubt, moments when we will miss our cues, moments when we will flub our lines, and periods where we think our two-bit part is far more central than it really is. But what I have learned in this experience of community theater is precisely the fact that community remains at the center. Both onstage and offstage.
Indeed, that what goes on backstage is no less important than the performance itself. Backstage where neighbors become friends, where we shared snacks like Eucharist, and where the people, not just the characters they play reveal something of who they really are to one another. If I am to be honest, this is precisely what made my participation in this year’s play so profound.
There is no doubt a metaphor here: that what matters most in the course of our lifetimes is not only what takes place on stage, in public, for all the world to see; but what takes place behind the scenes, in our heart of hearts, often out of view from the world, but which makes the drama and the roles we are called to play evermore elegant and significant, no matter how small.
So, let’s, each of us, unshackle ourselves from the illusion that any of us really plays a lead role in the unfolding theo-drama of God’s salvific plan. Indeed, let each of us in the brief time we are privileged to play our small parts upon the stage of salvation history, resolve to play them as small parts, but to play them BIG. The Lead Actor will expect nothing less!
+ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.