Playing the Field, Part II

Playing is itself a therapy. ~ D.W. Winnicott

Play is extremely important to child and adult alike. Winnicott describes health as “a state of being able to play”. Illness is “not being able to play.” Play therapy is used around the world to help many children (and adults as well) move through difficult issues in their lives emotionally and mentally as well as being used to help those with physical handicaps.

Play can also bring us to the edges of life. There is often a fine line between playful connection and destructive aggression, as there is between laughter and ridicule, sport and torment, or competition and combat. Kids and adults often use creative play and games to simulate a cosmic struggle between good and bad or life and death. Play exposes us to failure, loss, finitude, and destruction without serious risk.

Adults think that by becoming a man, we are to put away childish things.* However, play is just as therapeutic and joyful for adults as it is for children. Think about the last time you ran, jumped, swam, rode a bike, laughed until your sides hurt. Adulthood and age can inhibit play. Adulthood by definition involves growing up, out, and weary of play. Adults outgrow some of the best kinds of play, in much the same way that our capacity for wonder fades, as part of living longer and growing older, assuming responsibility for others, or maybe as part of human fallenness itself. But then along comes a child, not simply reminding us but inviting us to play. In other words, playing draws us into creation, heals, and resurrects. It re-creates.

When we truly enter into a game, we lose our usual self-consciousness.

The author goes on to write about how play can be “abused”. Once play is controlled by an adult or structured for the sole purpose of promoting the success of our child, it becomes work and you lose out on the benefits of free-flowing, creative play. Distorted motives, especially promotion of one’s own kid and oneself through a child, distort play and prevent play from serving any positive role in fostering joy, freedom, or faith. This kind of “play” takes a lot of time and energy and drains life from you and your family rather than recharging you/your family and fulfilling the basic play needs of your child. Think about those families where each member has two or three clubs/organizations/teams that they participate in, and yet no one feels like a member of the Family as a team anymore. As there are different forms of play, we need to be careful about which kinds we encourage. Revitalizing play as a practice of faith today calls for a steady and demanding discernment, moderation, proactivity, and repentance. These four steps constitute the recovery and transformation of play as a focal practice of faith. The author goes on to say the wrong kind of play can have a negative impact and we need to find appropriate uses of many forms of play. We must proactively and conscientiously pursue alternative forms of play that shape a richer household ecology and work against those that breed isolation, self-centeredness, and violence. Ultimately, we must repent and acknowledge our tendency toward perverting the best qualities of play, whether in response to social pressure or as a result of our own brokenness.

Play as a faith practice involves the whole person in body, mind and spirit; it brings meaningful connection to nature and other persons; it allows us to confront life’s limits and failures; and it offers a glimpse of grace. In its unique power to create, re-create, and resurrect, play embodies essential facets of God’s relationship to the world and of our relationships with God and each other.

Play recharges our batteries emotionally and refreshes us spiritually. So how many reasons do you need to make time for play? Go ahead and have some fun!

Crystal

_{All green text comes from Chapter 7 from In the Midst of Chaos by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore.}

* Taken from Paul’s verse in I Corinthians 13:11 – “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”