"OUR TOWN" -- A PRAYER AS WELL AS A PLAY

"Our Town" playwright Thornton Wilder once called his 1938 Broadway hit "a nice little play." The man under-valued himself. His later comments struck closer to the artistic truth. "The play is reminding us the ice cream is melting" and "we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures!"

When I was young, Emily's third act look-back from her grave struck my heart, but its sad wisdom never quite seeped into my head. Since then, time has happened...my parents have died...and my head has caught up to my heart. In those final 18 minutes of the play, Emily's brief return to life in her parent's kitchen transmutes from play to prayer. As she peers longingly at her parents -- busy with their daily trivia and unaware she is confronting them from beyond -- Emily at last realizes the enormously painful truth about this life: "We don't look at one another!"

Wilder becomes profound in saying here that only God -- and we only after we're gone -- have the perspective of seeing life as we live it. Otherwise -- and understandably -- we're simply living it. As if it will go on this way forever. In fact, aren't pragmatic Americans usually urged to "seize the day" and "live in the moment" for this all you have...?

Eric Erickson speaks of the stages of life as does Shakespeare, only with a psychological twist. While one of the early stages is his fight-or-flight, the last stage is integrate-or-despair. Once you've lived both, you can see each day and each moment as the unpolished pearl we usually forget it is. A raw jewel that calls not only for consciously burnishing it at the time, but then lovingly placing it alongside the rest in this necklace of memories we call life. And that we wear for such a short duration.

When Hollywood did the movie, of course it had to impose the appropriate happy-ending for the life-loving public. In Hollywood, Emily lives. But in the play she dies....and in the world we all die. Wilder's third act requires no confectionery editing anymore than does the brooding "Book of Lamentations" or the bleak records of Notre Dame and the Bears. The play duly reports life for what it is, death for what it is, and the opportunity we have to better fathom each, if only we take the time to do what Emily learns: To look at one another while we still can.

So what's the next pearl you're about to add to your necklace today....?