Center Stage

You know what I love the most about the stage? Anonymity.

Yes.

Every time you step onstage, you’re a new person; you’re not you, not really. You’re a character – you’re given a role to play, and a set of lines to say, or a sequence of movements to execute (I hate that word. Execute. You’re not killing the movement, are you?), to exhibit , or a series of notes and lyrics to deliver. Every movement, every expression, comes not from you, but from your character. What would your character do in this situation? What would he say? How would he react? Terrified? Exhausted? Ecstatic? Indignant? Flummoxed? So rich and varied the emotions and expressions one can have; so many choices for the artist in his living medium to make. Everything you do contributes to an audience’s conception of your character. The most jovial person alive may play a cold-hearted killer; this, then, is what is seen, what is ingested. The carapace of character exhibited by the performer becomes that with which the audience is acquainted; the person underneath means very little at all beyond a physical cue to memory – and even that is altered mightily by makeup, dyes, costuming choices, etc. You, the actor, are a nobody. You are nothing.

And there is no greater bliss, no more freedom, than in that knowledge.

You, as you, are not. you are not known, you are not seen, you are not heard.

And you are completely and totally liberated.

And you are never as much yourself as when you are somebody else.

When else are you presented with opportunities to face fears, exhibit emotions, or think thoughts that you – as you – never would? Performing, truly performing, strips one of excesses, of all the pieces of the daily costume, all the props, all the routine affectations. A performer is naked. Beautifully so. Nothing but a raw, exposed soul upon the stage, one who has allowed another’s words and actions and feelings to completely overwhelm and saturate his own personality, who has interpreted a character in such a way that the character’s personality is his, even while that is exactly what it is not.

In a similar way, the Christian is given a role to play – not saying that the way we behave is an act. It is much more than a role. It is that absorption, that imputation, that substitution – of Christ’s person for your whole self. “Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus.” Is there a higher characterization given? To act as Jesus did – “who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.”

To be the Creator of the universe, living on earth, encased in the meaty, sweating, stinking parcel of flesh and blood of Your fallen creation, and yet to retain completely the highest degree of holiness and perfection of soul…

And this is not the extent to which the love and devotion of our Savior reaches; in addition to taking on the character, playing the role of ‘human,’ Jesus gives us His own perfection, his own character. We are commanded to act as He did – an impossible, insurmountable mandate – and we are provided with the means to do so (yet ‘this not of yourselves; it is the gift of God’), or at least, to give the appearance of doing so:

I have been crucified with Christ and  
I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

We are privileged – we are disguised, well-costumed: acting is often spoken of as being farcical, as employing a lot of smoke and mirrors, and the greatest illusion in history is that which occurs each time a soul accepts his most important role: ‘saved soul.’ Upon acceptance, Jesus the Christ imbues the soul with His life, and makes the man the kind of creature upon whom God may look and say ‘You are my child, whom I love.’ When our Audience looks at us, He does not see a pitiful scrap of humanity limping about on the world’s apron. He sees the unsurpassable beauty, everlasting strength, glorious and bright-shining perfection of His Son, and it brings Him joy.

Performance – acting, singing, dancing, all of it – is an amazing world. In it, you may pretend as much as you like and as long as possible to be whatever and whomever you please; it is one of the most glorious and exhilarating avenues of escape and imagination accessible to humankind…and it is but a shadow, but a mirror, of the ultimate (and so very, very real!) flight of fancy by which we sojourn home. To relinquish everything that is of you; to become nothing, and yet, in that very nothingness, to be given everything. What a sweet surrender it is.