THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY

While not a word we might immediately associate with spiritual maturation, play is a powerful metaphor for a fully integrated life.  Few things frighten me more than persons who have become deadly serious about their religion.  Living in a flat world with limited dimensions, they have lost perspective.  They set no place at the table for the clown, the child, the muse.  They have lost the art of play.

Play is free-form spontaneous creativity.  It is the essence of improvisation, a state of intuitive receptivity to the God-given powers of the soul.  Play delights in the wonder of the moment, often finding joy and humor where they are least evident.  Like Jesus, the great saints of our tradition have been graced with joy and playful humor even in the midst of suffering.  If you doubt Jesus had a sense of humor, follow Elton Trueblood's suggestion: Imagine the Pharisee straining a gnat from his cup and instead swallowing a camel  -- yes, the whole huge mass of humps and hooves slides surreptitiously down his throat without his ever noticing!

Play involves befriending our "wild" side.  Some theologians have observed that God is "wild", undomesticated, free to play in sovereign creativity through time and eternity.  As beings made in the image and likeness of God, we reflect this creative potential.  The wild side of us is kin to the child side of us.  Children live in a world of improbable imagination.  Could this be one reason why Jesus said we must become "as little children" in order to enter the kingdom of God?  The picture Jesus paints of the kingdom is wildly improbable.  Things are truly upside-down from an "adult" point of view: the last are first, the great are small, the despised are blessed.

-- Marjorie Thomspson in Leading From the Center, Spring 2000


#3903

EASTER LAUGHTER

As Christians, we are people of the resurrection, therefore we are people who love to laugh, who believe that laughter is a wonderfully life-giving, defiant act full of the grace of God. Easter is that which enables us to keep going, even in our moral failures, even when being a servant of the Word is difficult. Those who have kept at the Christian ministry longer than I will confirm the essential virtue of humor… The ability to laugh at life's incongruities, to take God seriously but not ourselves, to embrace the strangeness of [other] people instead of strangling them to death with our bare hands -- this is great grace… Humor is the grace to put our problems in perspective,… to be reminded that Jesus really did need to save us, seeing as we have so little means to save ourselves. Humor is just a glimpse, on a human scale, of the way God looks upon us from God's unfathomable grace. By the resurrection, the gospel is enabled to be comedy and not tragedy.

-- William Willimon


#3192

AN ODD REQUEST

While a student at what is now Minot State University, I served as choir director and radio soloist for one of the local churches. One Sunday during our live broadcast, I faced the ultimate test of keeping my composure when the pastor announced my solo: "Mr. Tornow will now sing the old Swedish hymn, 'Children of the Heavenly Father,' in memory of Gust Johnson who died at the request of his wife on January 18."

Fortunately, the accompanist came to my rescue by playing a long introduction -- enough time for me to stop laughing.

-- Edward Tornow in Christian Reader "Lite Fare"

#2499

THE COFFEEPOT AT CANA

In our church kitchen, whoever drinks the last cup of coffee often fails to replenish the pot for the next person. Trying to motivate the staff to be more responsible, the secretary taped a neatly-typed plea to the pot: "If Jesus drank the last cup of coffee, what would He have done? Go thou and do likewise."

The next morning she found this scrawled response: "Jesus would have turned the water into wine instead of coffee."

-- Mae H. Fortson in Christian Reader, "Lite Fare"


#2350

NOTE: I will be on vacation next week. The next SOUND BITES quote will be posted be on Monday, August 10.