Behind the Stage of Life

September 18, 2008 Thursday
Behind the Stage
Sue and I begin almost every morning walking about 3 miles on Xiamen's beautiful boardwalk, but the past few days they've started blocking off parts of it for some kind of big extravaganza.

It will probably be beautiful by night, with thousands of lights on ornate frames and outlines, but by day it looks cheap and gaudy. The white paint on the wooden posts is peeling, and everything is held upright by guy-wires fastened to unsightly cubes of concrete that have been plopped on the grass. It reminds me of experiences on Chinese television shows.

TV productions look pretty spectacular when watching them from home, but I've been on dozens of stages in China, and up close they're not so impressive. They use the cheapest plywood or sheets of styrofoam, and string and wires--and glue, glitter and special lighting does the rest. But what shocked me more than the stages were the performers. They looked like normal people up close (and acted like it too), but heavy theatrical paint transformed them under the lights and cameras as they strutted about the stage, pretending to ad lib when in fact every word, pause and giggle was scripted.

But isn't all of life rather like a Chinese TV stage? Shakespeare said we are just actors, strutting about the stage--and how much of what we see, and admire, has as little substance to it as a theatrical stage?

About 100 years ago, a missionary in China wrote about the grand facades of the great granite edifices in London, Paris and other great European cities, but he noted that the appearance of elegance was, in fact, a facade, supported by the vast masses of impoverished peoples in other nations that provided the resources and labor for the great trading houses.

And about 100 years ago, Xiamen's Gulangyu Island was noted as the richest square kilometer on the planet, and even today has hundreds of elegant but mouldering mansions; but that wealth and elegance, too, was built upon a poor foundation-- the "Pigs 'n Poison" trade (opium and coolies).

Our personal lives may also have no more substance than that of an actor in a short-lived play, but we play our roles so intensely, for so long, that we tend to forget that this life is indeed a stage, and as we play our role we are watched by a great audience (that "vast cloud of witnesses"). And how we play our part--whether we get caught up in the lights and glitter of the stage or bear in mind the plot and the purpose behind it all, affects whether we go on to greater and more enduring roles.

Tomorrow morning, Sue and I will walk along the Xiamen boardwalk again, and navigate our way through the maze of sets and electrical cables that are strewn along the beach, and I suspect that sometime in the next couple weeks, XMTV or CCTV will air some great extravaganza and audiences will be thrilled. And then the sets will be dismantled and put away, and the show will be forgotten, and the vast majority of people, who have forgotten their own role and become professional spectactors, will wait for the next big attraction to take their minds off the emptiness behind lives that have no more substance than a TV stage, or a granite bank in London.

Fortunately, it does not have to be this way. We were not created to be spectators but participants, and to even have a hand in how the show unfolds. But to do that we have to look at life not from in front of the stage but behind it.