Life is an Audition

People often say that life is not a dress rehearsal. They’re right, of course, but neither is it a performance. Life is an audition. 

But we struggle to see life as an audition for three reasons: 

Firstly, because we can’t take the idea of life after death seriously, more’s the pity. 

Secondly, because we can’t take the idea of our not living forever seriously. 

And thirdly, because we are deeply resistant to the idea that life may be some sort of selection process. 

This is strange, given how we spend our whole lives immersed in the business of selection. From school friendship groups to retirement homes, we are preoccupied with being with the right sort of person, and not with certain others. And of course, how we treat others is how the world treats us: academically, socially, romantically, financially. In every way possible we are constantly trying to gain entry into certain groups, and colluding in keeping undesirables out of the groups we’ve managed to join. 

Maybe that’s why we don’t want life to be an audition: we’re so sick of competition and assessment that we’d rather no-one lived than just some people. After a lifetime of choosing and rejecting, being chosen and rejected, couldn’t death, at least, be one process where we don’t get told that we’ve passed or failed?  

But however much we may crave an end to judgement, it must be faced: there will be some sort of reckoning for all that we have done and not done. Our lives will be judged, and that’s hard to look in the eye, though judgement is looking at us, whether we can meet its gaze or not. Suppose there’s no conscious reward or punishment for our life’s achievements and failings: there will still be a scorecard, even if no one ever sees it.

Religious views about what comes after death are varied, including among Christians. But we all ought to agree that now matters, because of what comes next.  This is actually the case whether you believe in Karma or the Resurrection, an immortal soul or many rebirths or reincarnations.  And such a view of life need not be alien to humanists. Our life on earth is an opportunity to affect what happens after we’re gone. Whether we like it or not, our life is an audition. 

Even Christians resist this view of life, despite it being the basic theme of the gospel. Judgement is what Jesus is all about, from before he opens his mouth. We like to quote John the Baptist’s words about the coming Messiah: Whoever has two coats must share with whoever has none, but we end the quote there, just before he says of Jesus: His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.

And so it goes on. It’s hard to read the gospels without noticing how often Jesus says that some people, the meek for example, will be raised up, and others will find themselves excluded, downtrodden, punished and destroyed. And yet we manage it.  However plainly Jesus states these things in the gospels, some Christians have construed him as someone with an entirely different message. 

The man with the winnowing fork has somehow become a prophet of universal salvation.  If this Jesus said that life is an audition, he meant to say that everyone gets through, though some of us will need some catch up coaching post-mortem. This, we are told, could be a purifying fire, possibly quite nasty for some people, so this is what Jesus meant in his countless statements about the destruction of the wicked - it will be only be the wickedness within them that is destroyed; the person - like everyone else, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Myra Hindley, included -  will get to heaven in the end. 

If we actually read the gospels it should be clear to us that such a Jesus is like an imprisoned dissident reading his captor’s script to camera. Universalism may have much to recommend it, it may even be the truth. But come on, you didn’t get that from Jesus, did you? 

Jesus often invites us to observe nature in order to understand his teaching: let us not cease to do so post-Darwin. Natural selection does not convert the useless into the useful. Evolution has no problem excluding life forms from the future.  Why, then, should God not do the same?  Why shouldn’t God pick and choose who will best fit into the future described in the Beatitudes? Isn’t it enough to know that God’s criteria for selection is wonderfully different from the natural world’s merciless seeking after the strong and the pitiless?

I thought about ending with a couple of Jesus quotes about impending judgement, but that would miss the point. Quotes get countered with other quotes that seem to say something different. We will only settle the matter by reading things right through: the gospels from Matthew to John, the New Testament from start to finish, the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. All three exercises will confirm that Jesus’s message is the message of the prophets who came before him and the apostles who came after: Life is an audition.