Sermon Archives : Earlier Sermons
Play as Spiritual Discipline
June 1, 2003
It’s been a hard week to think about a sermon on play. It was the more than usual amount of time at hospitals that threw me off. It might have been something else though, could have been any number of things. Not all weeks are that way—but many are. Just not the best time to be playful. I’m sure you know what I mean. I wrestled with doing an alternative meditation (beach ball throw) knowing there’s bound to be someone in the room who just needs a chance to be still and quiet.
Then I reminded myself that there is really nothing frivolous about my topic this morning. I called this sermon “Play as Spiritual Discipline.” I might have also said, “Play as a means to spiritual health.” You know the standard drill: Smile like you mean it, and eventually you will. Don’t worry, be happy. Laughing promotes healing.
I was inspired to preach on this topic at Kripola Institute in December, when I attended a yoga retreat there right near the end of my sabbatical. One of the evening workshops was on play. This very lively woman in an outrageous hat made us dance around, make funny noises, and otherwise look ridiculous. I was a little uncomfortable. I have done my share of theatre, but I never relished the silly exercises. To say I was a little uncomfortable is not to say I didn’t have fun. I did. The workshop had no agenda. We weren’t expected to produce anything, learn anything, or accomplish anything. That was, in fact, the whole idea. It was great fun! And so of course, right after I had fun I went up to my room and worked on some sermon ideas on the topic.
The best part of the workshop was the toys. She brought the best toys. One of those big balls that contracts to make a little ball. Great for throwing across a circle. Several very silly puppets. Balls that bounce funny. Bubbles. I knew that night that I need more toys in my life.
In some ways those couple of hours brought me more to myself, to a place of peace and stillness, than silent meditation ever has. There’s that good exhausted feeling that comes after laughing hard. And the space created by setting aside worry about accomplishing something. There’s the freedom to imagine something entirely new. And the surprise of unexpected results. Playing does wonders for spiritual health.
We’ve all heard about the importance of play for children. Play is how children learn, discover themselves, create themselves, and discover others and the way to be in relationship. Margaret Flinsch, founder of one of the first nursery schools in the country, wrote this about play:
Children’s play is their approach to understanding what’s there. In contrast, adults’ play is an attempt to retreat from effort. Yet a lot of effort goes into play for both children and adults. Children’s play uncovers their world. There are certain things children are obliged to do, but in play—where there is no obligation—they come to something new and fresh. Play is a trying out—experimenting. It’s not a joke. Children don’t play for fun. They play for real, and adults don’t understand that: they laugh at what children do. To children, play is very serious.
That business about effort is interesting. That’s where, for adults, discipline comes in. A spiritual discipline is a practice, something I do with regularity and intention. It would be far too easy for me in my adult role, with all my adult responsibility, and with my adult ability to see what’s happening in the world, nearby and far away, to forsake play in my life. When you think about it, life is pretty serious business. So I must make an effort to balance work and play in my life.
For some, work is a necessary discipline. Work comes with being an adult. To thrive, and really, even to survive, meaningful work is critical. It might be the work we do for money; it might be the work we do in our yard; it might be the work of raising children or creating some other kind of beauty in the world. All of us must work. And for some of us it is a difficult path, work, and spiritual discipline assists us in finding our way to it. I have found, though, that the far more common reality for people in the western world we inhabit is a life with too much work and too little play.
One helpful way to think about the balance of work and play is to understand them as necessity and creativity. Work is the time spent on life’s necessities. Play, by definition, has no purpose but its own creativity. Necessity in our lives is toward an end we understand. Creativity is toward something new which we cannot know. When engaged in work, we seek to control ourselves and our environment. When engaged in play, we surrender control and allow life to happen. (In this sense, play continues to be about discovery, even for adults.)
Now some of us are a little more challenged by the idea of letting life happen. I enjoy bridge, you see. I like it more than games of mere chance. Can’t do chess, though. For me the balance works well when I can use my intellectual power, within the framework of rules I understand (when I remember them) to let go in play. Some of you probably feel about bridge the way I do about chess—what would be fun in that?!? Looks a lot more like work. We all must find the balance that works well for us.
I believe the difficulty some of us have in finding a healthy balance comes from our theology. I read one philosopher this week who offered those terms I used a minute ago, necessity and creativity. He offers a quick survey of the history of western thought which shows the way we in the west have embraced the intellectual foundation of necessity at the cost of creativity.
It begins with the ancient Greek idea that matter is “inert and dumb;” that what is, in a sense, does not live, is “merely” created. The creative source for all that is comes from outside. Fideler describes the way the philosophers of the Scientific Revolution embrace this idea. They “pictured the universe as being made up of discrete particles of matter in motion, and god as an engineer who set the whole apparatus whirling.” It’s a mechanistic model. And it leads to determinism. And in determinism there is no room for creativity.
This view is summed up by French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace who argued that if “we could start with precise knowledge of each particle in the universe, it would be possible to predict the exact state of the universe at any future point in time.” The universe as machine, mechanical. Not much room there for play and play’s byproduct surprise.
I believe that in the west the mechanistic model has grabbed us and will not let us go. If we embrace this understanding of our world, it’s easy to see how we could become obsessed with a work ethic that leaves play and creativity to children. Beyond the Scientific Revolution, Fideler asserts that the Industrial Revolution sealed the deal. Now, nature becomes “an unlimited resource for human exploitation, and workers [become] cogs in a vast economic machine.”
Many have offered alternate views, of course. The system seeks balance, just as we do in our own lives. I believe, though, that it will be hard to arrive at a balance as long as we cling to a picture of the world that is mechanistic. We need a vision that is alive, that reflects the play in nature, that observes the wonder of creation unfolding before our very eyes. I think it would have to be an organic model. A model that reflects our experience of Life and the world, rather than a model that imposes our own need for eradicating mystery for the sake of knowledge and control.
Many, many philosophers and scientists have moved beyond mechanistic thinking. And still, the echoes of this view linger in many of the systems around us and indeed even in our own way of being in the world.
Yes, I know, this is a sermon about play. I considered breaking us all up into groups and passing out toys. The work I offer, instead, is an effort to open the possibility of balance. A challenge to break out of a work ethic and an earnestness that really does, at some level, deny the creative, organic nature of the world and of our lives.
Victoria Safford, in the most recent issue of The Unitarian Universalist World offers a meditation which calls us to see the world, experience the world in all its wonder and beauty, and to answer with a song.
What if there were a universe, a cosmos, that began in shining blackness, out of nothing, out of fire, out of a single, silent breath, and into it came billions and billions of stars, stars beyond imagining, and near one of them a world, a blue-green world so beautiful that learned clergymen could not even speak about it cogently, and brilliant scientists in trying to describe it began to sound like poets, with their physics, with their mathematics, their empirical, impressionistic musing?
What if there were a universe in which a world was born out of a smallish star, and into that world (at some point) flew red-winged blackbirds, and into it swam sperm whales, and into it came crocuses, and wind to lift the tiniest hairs on naked arms in spring when you run out to the mailbox, and into it at some point came onions, out of soil, and came Mount Everest, and also the coyote we've been seeing in the woods about a mile from here, just after sunrise in these mornings when the moon is full? (The very scent of him makes his brother, our dog, insane with fear and joy and ancient inbred memory.) Into that world came animals and elements and plants, and imagination, the mind, and the mind's eye.
If such a universe existed and you noticed it, what would you do? What song would come out of your mouth, what prayer, what praises, what sacred offering, what whirling dance, what religion, and what reverential gesture would you make to greet that world, every single day that you were in it?
In work and in play we can discover such a universe. It arises out of necessity and creativity.