Playing with God
Superabundant Life
How many are your works, Lord!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro,
and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.1
Labor Day was one of those rare days in San Francisco when it is hot enough to swim in the ocean, so I repaired to Baker Beach. The water was great and the waves were just big enough to thrill without being too scary. I love to body surf and get knocked around by the waves. I am never more child-like than when I am in the ocean. It brings out a relaxed, playful side of myself that delights in the power, beauty, and liveliness of creation. When I listen to the waves, they seem to say, “Come and play with me!”
There is something primeval about salt water, sunlight, and sand. It touches a deep memory of our evolution from the sea. Like any experience of homecoming, playing in the surf is regenerative. It is healing. And it is just plain fun!
I am not alone in this response to the ocean. The whales seem to share my sense of playfulness. If you’ve ever observed whales, you can’t help but notice how they delight in showing off! They seem to enjoy being alive. The poet writes in the psalm that God made them to play in the ocean. The TANAKH – the rabbinic translation of the Hebrew Scriptures – says that God formed Leviathan (the whale) as a playmate. God wants to play with us!
I noticed the same playfulness in the sheep that ventured around my cottage while I was on retreat in Ireland recently. There were three sheep from the nearby ranch who loved the lower field where my cottage sat. They would graze and laze about all day, and then around 10 p.m. each evening they would circle around the cottage, knocking into the walls and into each other. “Don’t go to sleep yet, come out and play,” they seemed to say. Those sheep were nuts!
Or where they? Perhaps they instinctively know something that we too easily forget. Many years ago, my spiritual director at the time asked me, “John, why do you think God created you?” I mumbled something that vaguely sounded like it might be from the Catechism. He just smiled and said, “God made you because He thought you might enjoy it.” God wants to play with us. Even sheep know this. And we think they are dumb animals?
The poet Friedrich Schiller recognized the importance of animal play, which extends into human play. Play, in animals and humans, creates a realm of freedom from necessity and relaxes the tensions created by domination hierarchies in social life. There is more to life than just grim existence, and the rules of the game create a level playing field. As Schiller observed,
Certainly nature has given even to the creatures without reason more than the bare necessities of life and cast a gleam of freedom over the darkness of animal existence . . . The animal works when deprivation is the mainspring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is the mainspring, when superabundant life is its own stimulant to activity.2
Schiller suggests that human play moves from the physical play we share with animals to the aesthetic play that realizes our capacity for spiritual and cultural creativity. Play, rather than being just a game, is what makes us human. I would add that we are most like God when we are playing: enjoying the relaxed freedom of creativity, and loving the result.
Even something as simple as body surfing is a serious form of play. It involves a joining of intention with the ocean, an intuitive and sensory alignment with the rhythm of the waves, a union that is achieved through concentrated attention. It effects a kind of union with creation in riding the wave; a “win” achieved through playing well together. All of this is done quite un-self-consciously, which is another mark of play: it takes us out of the realm of overbearing self-consciousness; at least, when we see playing the game as intrinsically rewarding. Serious play undoes our propensity to take ourselves too seriously.
Robert Bellah, the great theorist of the evolution of religion, observed how ritual and religion are rooted in human play.3 Prayer, too, is a kind of play, in which we join intention and attention with God to create together. Prayer, and ritual more generally, creates a field of play in which we enjoy the freedom to imagine new possibilities for the game of life – what Schiller described as “superabundant life.”
Jesus, in his parable of the Good Shepherd in John’s Gospel, said, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”4 Jesus was a player. His parables were mind games, and his miracles – turning water into wine, walking on water, pulling in overflowing catches of fish, providing lavish meals for 5,000 guests on little notice with just a handful of leftovers, rising from the dead – were seriously playful attempts to open our eyes to the possibilities of superabundant life.
Play is the seed of the prophetic imagination, what Bellah refers to as the “Axial Utopias” of the great historic religions. The world of play is a better world and it allows us to imagine the workaday world differently. The moral imagination is not the product of deadly seriousness, but of lively playfulness. Too much of contemporary religion feels like all work and no play. Let us listen to our animal kin, and Jesus, the Good Shepherd, and embrace the divine invitation to play. It might just save the world.
Who will you play with today?
Psalm 104:25-27
Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, translated by Reginald Snell (New York: Dover, 2004 [1801]).
Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 567ff.
John 10:10b.