-- C. K. Chesterton
Meditation: by Dan Liberthson, a poem entitled “Child’s Play”
I play the World Series with marbles
on our vine-laced Persian carpet:
its palaces are bases,
its bowers become dugouts
where my heroes' cards wait
for their manager's hand.
I play both sides, home and away,
hitter and fielder—as always
no one on my team but me.
Adult shapes, fat and crooked,
bald and creased or worn thin,
edge around me,
pass through the house smiling
down as if to say dear child
you know nothing outside
your magic carpet, which
one day you'll find is only a rug
that will take you no place at all.
But I have just jumped
an impossible height, caught
Roger Maris' hot line drive to right
and brought it back over the fence.
The roar of the crowd
puts any doubt to rest:
in that moment I am blessed
and that moment is all there is.
Reading: by the psychologist Alison Gopnik from The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (p. 71)
When we see our children immersed in their pretend worlds we say, “Oh, she’s playing.” This is very revealing. In adult life we distinguish between useful activities, such as cooking dinner or building bridges, and activities such as reading novels and going to the movies, that are just, as we say, “fun” or “entertainment” – in other words, play. Since young children are protected from the pressures of everyday life, since they are, to be blunt, completely useless, everything they do looks like play. They aren’t out building bridges and plowing fields and they don’t make dinner or bring home a paycheck. And yet their obsessive and unstoppable pretend play… reflects the most sophisticated, important, and characteristic human abilities.
Reading: by philosopher Alan Watts from The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (p. 117)
…What use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use—which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing—for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound. Yet what would we think of a society which had no place for music, which did not allow for dancing, or for any activity not directly involved with the practical problems of survival? Obviously, such a society would be surviving to no purpose— unless it could somehow make a delight out of the "essential tasks" of farming, building, … or cooking. But in that moment the goal of survival is forgotten. The tasks are being done for their own sake, wherupon farms begin to look like gardens, … carpenters take time to "finish" their work, and cooks become gourmets.
The Power of Play
A Sermon Delivered on May 5, 2013
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
On a cold Saturday evening this past February, my wife, Elaine, and I joined perhaps ten other church members for an evening of fun and games, at the home of Umeeta Sadarangani and Marilyn Ryan. This was a social gathering that was offered at last year’s service auction, and that was billed as an evening of Balderdash.
Balderdash, as some of you know, is a board game that involves coming up with outlandish definitions for obscure words most of us have never heard before. So, for instance, we might all need to propose possible definitions for the word “opsablepsia” (awp-sa-blepp-see-ah),” or “flitterbick” (flitt-urr-bick). “Opsablepsia: a rare intestinal disorder,” one of us might write. Or “opsablepsia: a remote mountainous region in southern Croatia.” Along with our proposed answers, the right one would be read. Our job would be to guess the correct explanation. Only the fewest us would guess that the actual meaning of the first term is “not able to look someone in the eye.” And that the second is “a mythical flying squirrel that flies so fast no one has ever seen it.”
I had a great time that evening. And I think the others did too. Sitting around in a circle in Marilyn and Umeeta’s living room, with a few logs burning in the fireplace to keep away the winter chill, all of us intently involved in our game, each contributing imaginative answers, some of which sounded serious and some very silly. For reasons I can’t fully explain, I sometimes found myself laughing so hard, my eyes were watering and I couldn’t catch my breath.
* * *
When we engage in play, something shifts within us. We step out of the sober and straightforward attitude with which we usually approach life and enter something else. The author Diane Ackerman calls play a refuge from ordinary life, a sanctuary of the mind, where we are exempt from life customs, methods and decrees.
She writes,
“Play always has a sacred place – some version of a playground – in which it happens. The hallowed ground is usually outlined, so that it’s clearly set off from the rest of reality. This place may be a classroom, a sports stadium, a stage, a courtroom, a coral reef, a workbench in a garage, a church or temple, a field where people clasp hands in a circle under the new moon.” (Deep Play, p. 6)
* * *
Play is a kind of activity we often associate with children. Children play games and make-believe. Like the boy who recreates a World Series baseball game on the patterns of a Persian carpet, with players and managers, and crowds of fans in the stands cheering every play. Adults look on and chuckle. The child’s play is quaint and endearing. The adults are smug and perhaps condescending. For them, the magic carpet is only a common rug, that will take you no place at all.
To the adult, play may seem impractical and useless. But as psychologists have discovered, play is actually a crucial aspect of healthy human development. Play is, by definition useless, and yet without it we cannot become fully human. Imaginative play allows us to engage the world in ways much more complex than the sober factual observations of adults.
Alison Gopnik writes,
“While children may be useless, they are useless on purpose. Because, as children, we don’t have to restrict our imaginings to the immediately useful, we can freely construct causal maps and exercise our ability to [be creative]. We can compute a wide range of possibilities, not just the two or three that are most likely to pay off. We can consider different ways the world might be, not just the ways the world actually is.” (p. 72)
When we are in a state of play, we can draw on powers of imagination that will allow us to think far outside the bounds of convention. The power of “make believe” can allow us to envision a world, that is invisible to the naked eye.
Gopnik writes,
“The wild, harebrained, uninhibited three-year-old may be quite unable to do something as simple as get her snowsuit on (there are so many distractions: she has to play with the imaginary tiger and make sure her imaginary friend is dressed too). But she is, in fact, exercising some of the most sophisticated and philosophically profound capacities of human nature – though admittedly that may be cold comfort to the parent who has to make it to work on time.” (p. 73)
As a psychologist, who studies human behavior and development, Gopnik explores aspects of play that are unique to humans – how play reflects our most sophisticated, important, and characteristic human abilities.
But what makes play particularly fascinating, what gives us a hint as to the depth and breadth of the meaning of play, is the fact that the habit of playing is by no means limited to humans.
I am sure any one of us who has ever had pet cats, and has spent time watching them bat ping pong balls across the kitchen floor, or sneak up on one another and then play chase all through the house – you have a clear sense that play is an activity other species enjoy, too. Or any one of us, who has thrown a tennis ball across a lawn, so an excited and playful dog could run after it, and then bring it back, dropping it on the ground at our feet, and clearly hoping we will throw it again. This is play.
* * *
The psychologist Stuart Brown offers an example of how play has an unusual power, with the help of a series of photographs taken on a chilly November day in northern Manitoba. The photos show a wild and hungry polar bear, approaching two tethered huskies. The dogs’ collars are attached to long chains, which are bound to a spike in the ground. Unable to escape they are about to become the polar bear’s lunch.
The pictures clearly show the 1200-pound polar bear approach the dogs with an unmistakable predatory gaze. But the dogs don’t seem to grasp the danger of their situation. The female husky, in particular, approaches the bear in a play bow, wagging her tail. And then something unusual happens. The bear’s fixed behavior – the rigid instinctual routine that ends up with a meal – changes. Suddenly, the bear rises up on his hind legs, and stands over the husky. No claws extended. No fangs exposed. And the two animals launch into an incredible ballet. It’s a play ballet.
The photos capture an improbable scene, in which the husky bears her throat to the polar bear, and the bear grabs her gently in his maw. The pictures show how these two animals roughhousing are in an altered state. A state of play. It’s a state that allows these two creatures to “explore the possible,” Stuart Brown says. They are doing something together, that neither would have done without play signals clearly conveyed and understood. It’s a marvelous example, of a process in nature that is also within all of us. (from a “TED Talk” filmed in May 2008)
* * *
Our instinct and understanding of play is not only an expression of our most sophisticated, and highly developed human traits. It is also rooted deep in our evolutionary past. It reaches back before the creation of human culture and civilization back to our animal past, which we share with huskies and polar bears.
As we have grown to become human beings, the need to play has grown with us. As the Dutch anthropologist J. Huizinga observed,
“The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start. Take language, for instance… Every metaphor is a play upon words… Or take myth. In myth [we seek] to account for the world of phenomena by grounding it in the Divine. In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit is playing on the border-line between jest and earnest.” (Homo Ludens, p. 4)
* * *
For Alan Watts the idea of play goes deeper than psychology, anthropology or biology. The experience of play tells us something about the universe itself. The experience of play transcends narrow conceptions of what is useful and what is useless, what is meaningful and what is meaningless, what is real and what is illusion.
In Hinduism, the spirit of play infuses all of creation. According to the Vedanta Sutra, the world itself is lila – God’s play. God created the universe as a cosmic game, as an outlet for God’s overflowing creative and imaginative energies. Like a child who grew tired of playing alone, God created the earth, and filled it plants, animals and humans. As Huston Smith puts it, “God is the Cosmic Dancer, whose routine is all creatures and all worlds. From the tireless stream of God’s energy the cosmos flows in endless graceful reenactment.” (The World’s Religions, p. 71)
A similar idea is found in Greek mythology, where all-powerful gods seem all too human. As Plato once said, “Life must be lived as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then a [person] will be able to [gain favor of] the gods.” It is when we live our lives as play, that we emulate the divine play of the Cosmic Dancer, and we ourselves are like gods.
* * *
Diane Ackerman writes, play
“reveals our need to seek a special brand of transcendence, with a passion that makes thrill-seeking explicable, creativity possible, and religion inevitable. Perhaps religion seems like an unlikely example of playing, but if you look at religious rites and festivals, you’ll see all the play elements, and also how deep that play can become. Religious rituals usually include dance, worship, music, and decoration. They swallow time. They are ecstatic, absorbing, rejuvenating.” (Deep Play, p. 17)
* * *
Stuart Brown can’t imagine a life without play. He can’t imagine a life without humor, or flirtation, or movies, or games, or fantasy. He can’t imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise, without play. The spirit of play is an essential aspect of our health and wholeness. We need to remain in touch with this spirit.
“The true object of all human life is play,” writes C. K. Chesterton. And I agree with him. “Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground,” he says. And I respectfully disagree.
The earth is our playground. And our lives, here on earth – not in heaven – should be inspired by a spirit of play. Our playground is right here – every time we gather for worship, every time we join in singing, every time we sit down in a circle, among friends – seriously silly, and fully engaged.
May the spirit of play fuel our imagination,
So that we may see, not only the world that actually is,
But can envision a better world that might be.
And may we have the courage to play our part
In creating that world.
Amen.
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