Let's Have A Funeral. Let's Live.

A friend on vacation wrote to me about his children:

They were just holding Michael’s funeral service (all the children have died at least once on this trip) and then ended up jumping on the bed.

Alright, a bit morbid.

But the truth is, the older I get the more I think that I learn most of what I know through play.

And that you can’t learn unless you have a little playfulness.

Children worry about death.  So they enact it.

They worry about monsters (have you reflected lately what a grand word English has in “monster”?), so they imagine them, making them real for all practical purposes so that they might know the truth of the thing.

They worry about being powerless and imagine themselves with guns and beauty and brains and riches and competence.  They’ll probably become what they imagine, or some form of it, for better and worse.

To this very moment, I am learning through imagination, through cracking the boundary of what is and letting bleed through a little of what might be, controlling it in the arena of my imagination with the referee of my will.  The child is a little god.  God, as Chesterton reminds us, is younger than we, a child.  The sun does not rise because it is mechanical, he says, but because God is like a child saying, “Do it again!  Do it again!”

Maybe it’s not true that you have to be playful to learn, that you can tuck up your ethical self and force yourself to memorize the things you need to know.  But at the base of it, learning comes so much more easily where there is a desire, something you need and want.

The irony is that where there is desire, you’re almost unteachable.

Take the Man and the Woman in the Garden of Delight (Hebrew Eden).

The Serpent, the ancient symbol of wisdom, fertility, and immortality, comes to her breathing not lies but a truth: “If you eat of the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil you will become like gods.”  Well, yes.

And no.

The price of knowing is a considerable loss of innocence.  Maybe gods are innocent, I don’t know.  If to them the world is always a playground, then they are.

I used to tell my students that the Chancelor should offer them their degrees with the words, “Congratulations.  I’m very sorry.”  If we’ve taught them well, we’ve given them much play, and a lot of skinned knees, a lot of sorrow.  With much knowledge, says Ecclesiastes, comes much sorrow.  And Genesis had said it long before.  The price of learning wisdom from the serpent of curiosity is Delight: you lose it.  They learn through play, like the Man and the Woman.  They learn too that the price of the play is shame when some reality from outside themselves demands they look at themselves not as gods, but as creatures, naked and alone in a delight that has grown curiously hollow.

Christianity in the West posits that we are fundamentally flawed.  I’m not sure that’s an adequate description of us.  I think we are fundamentally choosers.  And we choose in such a way that our curiosity is gratified and our innocence and delight are shaken.  It’s what we do.

If there is a message in Christian faith worth choosing it is this: that it’s alright.  You chose what you did.  Add wisdom to shame, and you need not be ashamed.

My friend’s email was a delight.  The children playing at death seemed full of life.

Another friend wrote soon after, late at night, throwing up from drinking too much last night, unable to sit through church.

I thought about that for a little while and wrote back, “Take a shower.  Rest a while, drink some water, eat some bread.  Then remember who you are as the poison ebbs out of you.  It’s alright.  Those who love you love you still.  Those who don’t weren’t going to love you sober.  Learn a little wisdom.  Stand a little straighter.  And if you can, don’t forget how to play.  Only remember that when you scuff your knees in this life, you do bleed a little.”

We get older.  The stakes get higher.  The intensity of our learned lessons raises the level of play.  We must respond.

And to whom much is given, much must be forgiven.  People live around here.  Your play, your learning, breaks other peoples’ windows. 

But this is not a reason not to play.

Or as St. Paul put it, to us is given the ministry of reconciliation.  Sadly, God in heaven and many on earth have the right to accuse us to our faces.

But we also have the right to reconcile each other to ourselves and others.  We have the right to say, “No penalty.  Play on.”

And we have the wit, by some gift, to learn how to play the game better and better.

Comments

[Michelle]

Love this post. Very profound.

[EricW]

We recently (9 days ago?) got two puppies, toy schnauzers, a brother a sister from the same litter. All they do all day is play with each other. There must be something to that.