A Theology of Play

Peter Berger, in his book A RUMOR OF ANGELS (an absolute must-read) argues that there are a series of paradigmic human experiences, the phenomenology of which point to the existence of a transcendent source of meaning and value in the universe. I will discuss this more when I return to my apologetics project. But right now I want to talk about one particular 'signal' that I think is particularly relevant right now: the experience of play.

Berger says play is our first encounter with eternity. When we play, we step out of our normal experience of time. Think about football for example. It isn't 3:00 PM on Sunday. Not for those playing, and not for those watching. Instead it is 4th down, 1 yard to go, 2:39 on the clock in the fourth quarter. It isn't true that time simply flies when you are having fun. On the contrary, a single moment, a single throw of the ball, can be an eternity. No, in play we step outside of time. Eternity is willed and known intimately. Play brackets off time.

And just as it brackets time so it brackets the seriousness of the world. Whatever pain or tragedy a person is going through, it melts away the moment that joystick, ball, or crossword puzzle is picked up. This is why plays and musical groups' activities can go on even as the city around them crumbles due to an invasion. It is how Christmas could be celebrated by warring parties in WWII.

Of course some may see this as simple escapism, and it may be. But if one chooses to take the experience itself in full earnestness, then a different picture emerges, both of us and our world. Jesus transvaluates human values. The lowest are raised up as the highest, the highest are made the lowest. The seemingly unimportant becomes of supreme value. This is the real meaning of the Matthew passage. Children were, in, Jesus time, the most insignificant, the lowest. To command others to seek to be like them was oxymoronic.

Jesus Himself embodies this idea, as I've said many times. God comes as the lowly, not the great. This vision of God ultimately justifies our experience of play. For what is insignificant, silly, un-serious, is elevated over all that seems to threaten life and all that is, by the lights of the world, important and supremely serious. Psalm 98 shows us a cosmic picture of play. God skips, jumps and dances with the world. Life must be joyful, even in the face of great tragedy. When we make it so, we give witness to the God of Psalm 98 and to the Truth of Christ.

Humor and Holiness

My games center around holiness, but they also center around humor. Sometimes I sacrifice the one for the other. But is this really a sacrifice? I am willing to give a lot of moral room for someone who is genuinely seeking out the humorous in their behavior or words. I have written in other blogs that humor is in itself a religious experience, one of the experiential grounds for believing in God and the spirit. I hold this to be true. Of course one's games can't be truly 'anything goes' if one is going to have any moral or spiritual message at all, but there can be a lot that DOES go, if one really values the humorous as I do.

I have always seen humor as holy. Humor in part helps us learn vulnerability. You cannot force anyone to laugh at a joke. Every time you tell one you 'put yourself out there' and if it doesn't evoke laughter, it is a little embarrassing. Laughing itself feels very vulnerable. The ultimate vulnerability is when  you enter into a relationship where friendly ribbing is the norm. Those kinds of relationships can be very rewarding and joyful, but they do indeed put you in a vulnerable place. The key is to have the vulnerability work both ways. The various ways humor relates to vulnerability, the danger this creates, and how to navigate this in relationships should be explored. The RPG's help us explore them.

Humor is all about incongruence. A dwarf walks into a bar with an elephant, a monkey smokes a cigarette, God and the devil have a conversation. It is about holding two seemingly at odds realities in creative tension. But some philosophers have suggested behind the multitudinous funny incongruences there is some fundamental incongruence that is being expressed. Freud thought it was the incongruence between the id and superego. Others have suggested an incongruence between the way the world is and the way it should be, between the spirit of man and his' embodied state, and so on. We will talk about incongruity, what the fundamental incongruity might be, and why it matters. One of my favorite humorous devices in my games is olyphants. Olyphants are small flying elephants that are also angels of a sort. I love including them in my games, often in weird get up or situations. Their are tropes in every good DM's games. Olyphants as an example of holy humor is one of mine.

Humor is to my mind all about transcendence. Humor really is a kind of magic. Only a human being can tell a joke, and start a chain of events that can bring down an empire. Humor evokes joy in another. It is a gift we give to each other. But just like we think of magic as something that can be misused, so can humor. I think humor is all about joy. It is corrupted if it becomes only about MY joy. If I am using humor parasitically, bringing myself joy at the expense of the joy of another, I violate it's central nature and corrupt it. As with everything, I see good as primary, and evil as derivative. Evil is not the absence, but the corruption, of the good. In my games, a course of action which is slightly humorous always has an advantage over one that does not. Smart players figure this out and use it to their advantage. But humor that is hurtful does not have this power. Joke mages and sarcasm mages are powerful in my games.

Humor is all about human connection. We feel a kind of spiritual communion with those we lead into laughter, as we feel communion with those we laugh with. It is a way of transcending isolation.

Humor can be redemptive. In a moment a well-timed joke can overcome, if only for a moment, even the most terrible grief. I think here about the end scene of STEEL MAGNOLIAS. Humor can be a tool to fight oppression, and to spread truth. One way to destroy evil is to laugh at it. Corollary thought: I've often thought of Christ as God's joke on the world.

Humor creates a counter-world of joy. It turns the world upside down. The president is brought low as the butt of the homeless man's joke. We can excuse a lot of actions and words we might otherwise find morally offensive if we truly believe it was 'just a joke'. The world of the serious is made of little importance. The world of the silly is brought high to the utmost importance. And if someone can't step into this counter-world, we count them as people who are missing out. Life without humor seems meaningless. Moreover, it seems hardly any kind of life at all. That is key in the games we play. We are all experiencing a counter-world of hope and joy. That is what spiritual RPGs are all about.

Humor helps us detach from that which is unimportant. If we take ourselves too seriously, we are setting ourselves up for undue and unnecessary grief and suffering. The ego is softened in laughter. We step outside of ourselves, our very concept of 'self', of who we are, can be broadened if we reflect on the reality of laughter.

The detachment we feel through laughter can lead to compassion, and tolerance. One of the themes of Jonah is that all people are equally stupid and silly, and that God loves us in our stupidity and silliness. If we learn to not take ourselves too seriously, we can see ourselves as more on the level of other people. Less ego, more love.

Humor's power to inspire, move, to get people to take life less seriously, is unconsciously recognized and to some degree feared by society in general. Society has a vested interest in us taking some things seriously. It also has a vested interest in not letting people's sense of humor lead them to anarchy. And, as we said, humor is a power that can be corrupted. So society for reasons both honest and dishonest compartmentalizes the humorous. It pays certain people to be funny men. It gives them a stage and a time and place. We make it clear that there are times when humor is not appropriate. This is similar to what we do with religion: we institutionalize it to leash it's power.

There is a possible cosmic image here. The non-coercive nature of evoking laughter can be looked at as a model for God's relationship with the universe. God doesn't create by coercive power, but by persuasive influence. Making someone laugh is a power, as we've said. But it is a non-coercive power. God's act of creation may be very much like my creation of laughter in you.

Ad Corp Game Takes a Turn For The Weird

There is a threesome that has been playing mostly via skype for about 10 months or so. Their current game was about corporatocracy and the nature of freedom. The game was set up for the characters to conjecture about the ultimate nature of their world, and to explore some of the stranger parts of my multiverse. There has been a lot about self-sacrifice and its connection to freedom, and today one of the players gave up their characters so the character could spend eternity united with the 'ultimate song'. The game has gotten very strange. But that's not surprising, given this group's desire to kind of dig deep psychologically and spiritually while exploring the game. A lot of symbolism and grand cosmic schemes. I see this game as kind of in the vein of the Book of Daniel or the Book of Revelation. These grand concepts are incarnated in living symbols that take on a life of their own. Of course Daniel and John were pulling from the imagery that dominated in their day: dragons, winged angels, beasts and more. I pull from modern media alongside those more classical images. But the result is the same. This game may be the most revelatory we have going. I know everyone involved has had some strange spiritual experiences connected to the game. But it's weird. Kind of like God. Kind of like life.

Kids Games Take A Turn for the Worse

The afterschool games on Monday and Tuesday have been rough this week. The Monday group was facing an enemy that thrives on bad luck and foolish decisions, and they kept making both. By the end they were in such dire straits that they had to appeal to "Bob From Accounting" one of the mysterious "uber-beings" in my game, and had to agree to work for him for a while. It's going to be a rough ride. This group has been trying for a long time to figure out when to be serious and when to be silly. That's a profound insight isn't it? Isn't there at time for levity and a time for seriousness? And when to do what isn't always clear. In my games, humor has great power, but that power can be a double-edged sword. Ecclesiastes writes about this endlessly, and in fact in our Bible study group (which both young RPGers and Dancers attend), talked about this a lot last night. Right now, an inability to navigate this has cost the Monday group a lot.

The Tuesday group is facing a different problem. After a fruitless search for more and more power to defeat one enemy (that ended in disaster), they have gone too far the other direction and focused too much on being cautious. As a result, they holed up in one place too long and saw a lot of the progress they made last week disintegrate when their current enemy took advantage of them staying too long in one place. Luke 14:25-35 reminds us that in life we need to be deliberate and to calculate costs carefully. But the entire life of faith is a constant risk-taking venture. It is about jumping into the pool and pushing life as far as it can go. When to be cautious and when to be bold is as hard a dichotomy to navigate as when to live into the power of levity and when to take life with utmost seriousness. Watching these kids navigate these problems in the context of the game is very interesting. Along the way, in the context of the game, mistakes cost a lot. But that is just helping them to think through these issues on a real-world level going forward.

Interestingly enough, as the kids in both these games explore these issues, they look more and more to Holy Power within the game. It brings up an interesting question. Is God the safe choice in life? Do we only turn to God when things get more dangerous? Is this a good or bad thing. We are talking about that a lot in those games as well.

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