The Actor and the Minister

The church is flourishing now. When I went to Burke's retirement party in the church hall a week before the play, there were about 200 people. He had preached to them innumerable times, visited them in hospitals, conducted the funerals of their fathers, mothers and sometimes their spouses or children. He had comforted them in moments of grief, loss and depression. Among those at the party were young men and women whose lives had been defined by the community he formed around the church. And there were children who will enter that community without him.

Being a minister is like being an actor. The work is ephemeral. It is about personal transformation, empathy and self-reflection. It does not define its worth by profit. It posits that our role in life is to make the world a better place, to protect the weak, to take care of the sick and to love our neighbor as ourself. It celebrates the majesty and musicality of language. But those who dedicate their lives to beauty and truth have no place in the corporate state. What does not feed the mania for profit and the cult of the self is superfluous and often ridiculed.

At Burke's request I read the T.S. Eliot poem "Marina" at his retirement party. The poem is built around Shakespeare's "Pericles." The final plays of Shakespeare are filled with poignant reunion scenes, moments when loved ones mysteriously return after being lost. In "Pericles" a father regains a daughter he thought was dead. Shakespeare reminded us at the end of his life that it is those around us, those we love, who matter most.

Eliot uses the metaphor of water in the poem to define the course of our existence. Water flows from streams and rivers, expanding and contracting like our lives, until merging into the vastness of the sea. The place where all waters meet is the place of death. Pericles is conscious of this, even as he rejoices in his reunion with his daughter. In Eliot's poem the unnamed Pericles asks that he be able to remember, even in death, the sound of his daughter's joy, the "Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet / Under sleep, where all the waters meet."

Great actors, like great ministers, know that love and empathy must be honored if we are to be fully human and create sustaining communities. It is a message that is harder and harder to hear amid the din of the corporate state. It is a message that is deeply subversive to capitalists bent on ceaseless exploitation. Those who bring us this message call us back to our better selves. Milligan did it from a stage. Burke did it from his pulpit. Heed them.