Our Town & Fellowship
Fellowship is very important in the Christian life. The coming together of brothers and sisters to hold each other up and be with each other is not just a benefit for the Christian but necessary to complete the walk towards Christ we all take part in. Fellowship is not only promised but commanded. [Nehemiah 8; Proverbs 27:17; John 17:6-26; Acts 2:37-47] Often we seem to miss having any fellowship at all. We'll go to church on Sundays and Wednesdays, and to all of our prayer groups and Bible studies and such, and we'll go to weddings and birthday parties and funerals, but it is a very small percentage of our life we spend at weddings and funerals and at church and such. In this moment, right now, as you read, are you in fellowship with your brothers and sisters? Are you in fellowship with Christ? Have neither received your attention right now? What about the moment after you finish reading this? What about in the third hour of your work day, when you're settling in? Every moment wake and sleep is spent with Christ, and nearly every moment is spent with others, and we waste it all. We think focusing on the big moments is enough, but the big moments don't make a life. Our Town is perennial because the actor-residents and town that the Stage Manager paints a picture of do that which everyone has always done throughout human history: miss it all.
The residents of Grover's Corners, which is portrayed as in the 1900s and 1910s, are shown active in their big gatherings. They like their hangouts. The first act of the play shows something not quite a once-in-a-lifetime event but still something consistent and major: choir practice for church. Act One is supposed to show a normal day in a person's life. Even such small "big moments" as choir practice are not appreciate by all. Mrs. Soames, one of the choir ladies, remarks on her way home that evening "It's bright as day. I can see Mr. Soames scowling at the window now. You'd think we'd been to a dance the way the menfolk carry on." Mrs. Gibbs similarly says once she makes it to her home, "'Now Frank [her husband], don't be grouchy. Come out and smell the heliotrope in the moonlight.' They stroll out arm in arm along the footpaths."[1] It is a special time, even if it's not unique and not appreciated. The Stage Manager shows this to set us up for the bigger, more memorable events. Act Two is focused on the wedding between George and Emily, a partial focus during the first act who are now zoomed in on, in Act One two kids who are friends, now in their almost twenties. The marriage seems askew at first, as Emily is scared to be married, and George's mother is scared for George to be married, but everyone comes together and are able to sort the wedding out by coming together and assuage the fears of all. George and Emily happy marry, and from what is given happily live married. This important moment of connection is not severed but put to waste as Mrs. Soames rudely interrupts the Stage Manager as he is wedding George and Emily: "MRS. SOAMES has been sitting in the last row of the congregation. She now turns to her neighbors and speaks in a shrill voice. Her chatter drowns over the rest of the clergyman's voice. . . 'Don't know when I've seen such a lovely wedding. But I always cry. Don't know why it is, but I always cry. I just like to see young people happy, don't you?'"[2] The Stage Manager, none too happy but also not direct about it, remarks as the wedding is closing, "'The cottage, the go-cart, the Sunday-afternoon drives in the Ford, the first rheumatism, the grandchildren, the second rheumatism, the deathbed, the reading of the will,-' He now looks at the audience for the first time, with a warm smile that removes any sense of cynicism from the next line. 'Once in a thousand times it's interesting.'" Meanwhile, "The BRIDE and GROOM reach the steps leading into the audience. A bright light is thrown upon them. The descend into the auditorium and run up the isle joyously."[3] It is a dark and uncertain moment, overplayed, but ultimately not one to be snide for. It is a moment that is overcome through the coming together of people, and similarly made to be lesser. The stage is arranged and the actors dictated once more in Act Three, where the Stage Manager shows Emily's funeral, posited as having died in birthing her second child, and Dead Emily herself appears – dead but alive in her own way, able to talk to others and such. This is the greatest moment of fellowship of all, for everyone all comes together, the living and the dead, and they mingle with each other. Yet, aside form distant comments of pity, no one really connects at the funeral. It is only George, coming back in the early night after everything else, who returns and earnestly falls before his dead wife's feet. As the funeral recedes, it is the dead primarily who mingle together, Mrs. Soames, Mrs. Gibbs who is Emily's mother, Simon the choir leader, among others, who generally all seem dissatisfied and yet content.
The ending makes the Stage Manager's cynicism towards the wedding more clear. These big gatherings are important, but not quite as important as we make them out to be. Dead Emily is able to live again any moment of her life, and she chooses to ask the Stage Manager to direct it in spite of the warnings of all of the dead she is in company with. Naturally she chooses a "big moment," but because of the protest of the Stage Manager and her mother she chooses a relatively unimportant big moment, her twelfth birthday, and even the morning of this is and being with her family and seeing everything for the first time is enough to make Emily see what the dead had warned her of:
"EMILY, in a loud voice to the STAGE MANAGER: 'I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don"t have time to look at one another.' She breaks down sobbing. The lights dim on the left half of the stage. MRS. WEBB disappears.
"'I didn't realize. So all of that was going on and we never noticed. . .
"Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners. . . Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking. . . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths. . . and sleeping and waking up."[4]
This is not the first time Emily has had these thoughts. During Act Two, the Stage Manager interrupts the play to have the actors portray the moment George decides he wants to marry Emily – he doesn't ask Emily for marriage, just decides that he will eventually. The decision is caused because Emily scolds George. "Well, up to a year ago I used to like you a lot. And I used to watch you as you did everything. . . because we'd been friends so long. . . and then you began spending all your time at baseball. . . and you never stopped to speak to anybody anymore. . ."[5] Emily regrets being so direct, but she does the right thing in doing this and brings George back towards fellowship with his friends – without the complete sacrifice of baseball, as some teammates do crash the wedding scene and the Stage Manager has to chase them away. It is only that now she shows the audience the depths of that revelation, something her child acting was not permitted to come around to. It may seem, for example, that Mrs. Soames is merely being rude on account of interrupting and talking over the Stage Manager, but it is much worse than this. She is ignoring and abandoning the depth of the moment altogether; she is attempting to live a surface level life, only acting out her acting. They can barely assume lucidity at weddings, let alone in wayward moments in ice cream shops. They miss all of the small things, and as such they miss it all. This is the same thing Emily warns George about.
Consider all of this in regards to the Lord. It is one of the core foundations of our faith that we have available a taste now of and a promise of eventual fulfillment of perfect heirship with the Lord. This would amount to constant companionship with Him. You remember being saved, being baptized, the first time you discipled someone or led someone to Christ, your Church's annual get-togethers, Easter and Christmas, maybe to watch the Super Bowl or other such things. Heaven will not be replacing all moments with these kinds of things but rather allowing sinless life through all of its moments. Heaven would be living as your are now, regardless of what elations or tragedies the world has found for you, without sin and being inseparable from the Father. It would be looking at trees and counting clouds and sitting in a room, playing basketball and going on morning jogs and lifting weights, all in perfect fellowship with your Creator and sharing this fellowship equally and fully, and giving fellowship with all of the other believers throughout the ages. Think now of all of the times you listened to clocks ticking and saw flowers and ate food and drank coffee and ironed clothes and took baths and fell asleep and woke up. All of those times you turned your back on Christ. The Holy Spirit was directing you through this moment, through life, life as the Image of God, and in your sin you cast aside the Spirit and experienced these moments in the most surface-level, distant, apathetic way you could manage. You turned your back on the depths of Christ and sought the most dissociative path forward. It is the Lord's great mercy that He should not cast us away but renew us to experience life without these parameters, to experience full life with Him.
Present throughout all of the acts is the hymn "Blessed Be the Tie That Binds," a hymn by John Fawcett about connecting to the Lord and connecting to your fellow believers. It is practiced at choir and played at the wedding and funeral. It is a nice macrocosm of the fellowship the Stage Manager is trying to make us see, trying to put our focus on throughout the play. The last refrain goes as such:
"From sorrow, toil, and pain,
And sin, we shall be free;
And perfect love and friendship reign
Through all eternity."[6]
This is the promise that awaits us, not just of being capable of taking in all of the moments we spend in fellowship but being made perfect in Christ and unable to miss them in any regards. Not just of being around others but being friends with them, true friends. This is the promise of Heaven, that one day we will all be together and be with each other and love each other without any fear of sin interfering with our love for one another. This is the promise Our Town shows us, but it is missing a vital part of this promise; not only will we be able to love each other perfectly through Christ in Heaven, but we will be able to love the Triune God Himself, the source of this love to begin with. It is with Him that we truly long to be with, and it is the promise of being able to love Him perfectly that makes Heaven as enticing as it is for us. [Isaiah 65:8-25; Hebrews 11:8-16, 12:1-2] Should we lose sight of this, we should lose sight of Heaven itself, casting our gaze on worldly things. Remember your brothers and sisters and be there for them always; remember Christ and keep communion with Him always. We are sinful creatures and are inherently out of alignment with what we need to be. Life does go to fast for us to see everything, but in every moment be mindful to reach out to your Father, stand next to your friends, and plant your feet on the Earth.