David Zahl:

Play describes a way of being in the world that divine grace makes possible—a way that is dynamic and delight-filled, outward-oriented yet faithful. As such, it represents an urgent if tragically undertapped opportunity for Christian witness to a world drowning in dreariness. Those who champion grace might do well to champion play as a response to it. […]

The blessed assurance of grace announces that the high-wire game of proving ourselves is finished. By grace, the lingering threat of judgment has been removed, establishing precisely the sort of safety that Burghardt’s definition requires for a person to play, albeit on a deeper, existential level. What this means is that, when it comes to God, the Christian is set free from the spur of necessity and can enter into a new relation of play. Nigerian theologian Nimi Wariboko connects the dots when he writes, “The logic of grace is the logic of play.” 

In more gut-level terms, the key question of the Christian life becomes one of freedom: What would you do, what risk would you take, what would you say if you weren’t afraid? What would you do if you truly believed your standing with God was secure, the ultimate threat of judgment was removed, and you didn’t have to do anything? How would you spend your time and energy if you could undertake something for the sheer joy of doing it rather than any outcome it might produce? 

These are scary questions, but I suspect their answers have something to do with exercising the unique gifts God has given each of us. We may even find ourselves free to think of others and their well-being rather than anxiously safeguarding our own. 

Fortunately, a theology of play is built on more than the absence of judgment. It also takes seriously Christ’s exalting of children. In Matthew 18:2–3, we read how Jesus “called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.’” There are many ways to interpret his words: as an invitation to humility, as a beatitudinal valorization of the least, as a rebuke to the social hierarchies of the day. But certainly an endorsement of childlikeness should make the list. The only thing children do is play. At least, that’s what they do after their immediate needs are provided for—and before extracurriculars get ahold of them. There is no becoming like a child that does not involve play. […]

If play is truly an essential dimension of a Spirit-driven Christian life, a sense of humor is not spiritually negligible. Silliness and self-deprecation become not just virtues but acts of resistance in a world (and a church) that enshrines productivity more with each passing day. You will know them not just by their works of love but by the “useless” laughter that accompanies those works. 

Peco Gaskovski (quoted a little out of order):

Despite our astonishment at her opinion and excessive hot-takery, we didn’t stand up in self-righteous outrage and throw our young guest out of the house. We, the hosts, always expect to encounter some unusual perspectives during our supper salons. We have no intention of dismissing people and ruining relationships just because of a deviant opinion or two. The food and music also help. Outrage just doesn’t happen in the presence of beef lasagna and Frank Sinatra Live at Madison Square Garden.

I’m less concerned about what happens at our supper salons, than with what is happening in the world. Much of the internet has devolved into a gossip and confabulation machine, and AI only amplifies the half-truths and general loudmouthery in the public discourse, making it harder to see truth. Not that seeing truth was ever easy, of course.

[…]

[People grow beliefs the way June lawns grow dandelions. It can’t be helped. And every civilization is plagued with these cognitive dandelions, which send out spores that float away, land, proliferate into new dandelions. This is the way of the world. My mother grew up in a poor Balkan village where, during its heyday from around 500 A.D. (when the Slavic migrations arrived) to around 1960 A.D. (when everybody started immigrating to the West), people lived small intertwined lives, in mud-brick homes scattered around a nameless river that was just called “the river”, and everybody knew everybody.]

Villages have their priests, or maybe a wise old babushka, who can tell it to you straight. All societies need authority. At the level of civilization, authority used to belong to the Church, and later belonged to the State, and is now split between the State and a handful of vape-smoking twenty-something-year-old billionaires with a knack for coding.

Michael Taylor:

Davos is usually a place for polished platitudes, carefully manicured optimism, and the occasional nervous billionaire pretending to care deeply about the planet. Into this alpine shrine to seriousness strode Trump, carrying not policy, not vision, but vibes. Strong vibes. Tremendous vibes. Possibly the best vibes anyone has ever brought to Switzerland.

From the outset, the speech felt less like an address to global leaders and more like a rally held in an echo chamber. There were boasts untethered from facts, grievances aired as if the audience were a captive jury, and digressions that appeared to be chasing one another around the podium like startled chickens. […]

One could almost hear the collective internal monologue of the audience: Is this… the speech? Diplomats stared with the fixed smiles of people trapped in a lift with someone explaining crypto. CEOs blinked slowly, recalculating their life choices. Somewhere in the Alps, a cow likely stopped chewing.

And yet, the most remarkable thing about the address was Trump’s apparent certainty that it had gone well. In his mind, no doubt, it was flawless – historic, even. The laughter (if any) would be interpreted as admiration. The discomfort as awe. The silence as respect.

Davos will move on, as it always does. Panels will panel. Declarations will be declared. But Trump’s speech will linger as a reminder that failure, when paired with supreme self-confidence, does not always recognise itself as failure.

Which, in its own strange way, may have been the most honest part of the performance.

Frank Bruni (via Tipsy Teetotaler):

I’m feeling dark, so no playful notes today. Just this: I never, ever want to hear the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” again.

There is no derangement among those of us horrified by Trump. There never was. There was simply honest recognition of a spectacularly dishonest and disgraceful bully who showed his colors from the start, before his first election to the presidency, when he mocked John McCain’s years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war, when he mused about some gun enthusiast taking a shot at Hillary Clinton, when he commenced the refrain of his political life — “rigged,” “rigged,” “rigged” — before his Electoral College victory proved the opposite. He was as ready then to lay waste to democratic traditions and institutions as he is now. He was the same aspiring autocrat, just with less practice and power.

“Derangement syndrome” itself should go away. It’s a glib, hyperbolic dismissal of substantive concerns. People on the right who repeatedly raised alarms about Biden’s cognition and health were accused of “Biden derangement syndrome,” but beneath the exaggerations and gracelessness in which some of them indulged were rational observations. “Derangement syndrome,” like so much else these days, shuts down meaningful debate, turning it into so much mud slinging.

With Trump, language has been challenging. There was the period of respectful, reflexive disinclination to use “lies” or “lying,” until the growing tower of euphemisms and synonyms toppled under its own absurdity. “Fascist” was a red line that’s now receiving something of a green light.

“Until recently, I resisted using the F-word to describe President Trump,” Jonathan Rauch wrote in The Atlantic about a week ago, later adding: “Reluctance to use the term has now become perverse. That is not because of any one or two things he and his administration have done but because of the totality. Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.”

How I wish I could label that assessment deranged.

Joseph Orso:

When work is mere work, when it’s not naturally prayerful, not naturally communal, when your grandparents and children are not a part of it in some way, when it’s fragmented from your existence so that your co-workers are in a separate communal category from your family and friends, or when earning a paycheck dominates your waking hours and you are not free until five o’clock, this pattern, to me, has something dead in it. […]

In the traditional Ladakhi culture, writes Helena Norberg-Hodge in her book, Ancient Futures, work and festivity are united:

Even during the harvest season, when the work lasts long hours, it is done at a relaxed pace that allows an eighty-year-old as well as a young child to join in and help. People work hard, but at their own rate, accompanied by laughter and song. The distinction between work and play is not rigidly defined.

I have no problem idealizing a traditional culture. Of course individuals have surely been flawed wherever they’ve shown up. But industrial culture as a culture is so extremely de-graded, probably like civilizational cultures in general, that the search for any particular good takes us outside of it. We require inspiration and ideals to make our way out of industrial work, and the variety of traditional cultures can suggest patterns of daily life that match our own intuitions and deepest longings. […]

In seeking a different vessel for work, I suppose I always come back to subsistence work, though not in the meager sense of merely meeting one’s basic needs, which is actually the secondary definition of “subsistence.” The primary definition is “real being: existence,” which aligns with the meanings of the word’s various Latin roots: “actual existence, real being,” “substance, reality,” “stand still or firm.“ The word is related to the Greek “hypostasis, meaning “foundation, substance, real nature,”“that which settles at the bottom.”

Subsistence work, then, means existence work, or work that makes you a real being; foundational work, or work that makes you stand firm. And what work makes us into real beings? What work helps us stand firm? Certainly the answer is not work that turns time, labor, and nature into profit, that grinds all of Creation into raw economic material […]

In a culture that works like a machine, most of us cannot give our full attention to working like humans.
Degraded as it is, the culture has us.

But while subsistence work isn’t attainable for us, it’s the sane orientation for those trying to course-correct away from industrial work. There are never solutions to machine culture, only abandonment of its strange ideals and a walking toward reality.

Also, I will be getting myself one of these t-shirts:

Machine culture says this: No work, no play.

The pithy threat means that if you want leisure that is mere leisure, you earn it through work that is mere work.

When she was 10 my daughter gave me a t-shirt that she’d painted with fabric paint to say this: “All work, all play.” I don’t think she was attempting with this Christmas gift a grand statement about culture; she was simply saying something that sounded right to her ears. And she was sharing a gift.

He closes the essay with this: “In a culture that uncreates the human through work that is mere work, what else can you do but play within the pattern like this…? … In a culture where work generally desecrates human experience, to giggle while you kneel in the soil and harvest tomatoes is to undermine the machine. In a small way it is to recreate, to truly recreate.”

(See also this reflection from Jeremy Abel.)

Denise Levertov:

CONTRABAND

The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That’s why the taste of it 
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder 
for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.
God had probably planned to tell us later 
about this new pleasure.
We stuffed our mouths full of it,
gorged on but and if and how and again 
but, knowing no better.
It’s toxic in large quantities; fumes 
swirled in our heads and around us 
to form a dense cloud that hardened to steel, 
a wall between us and God, Who was Paradise.
Not that God is unreasonable-but reason 
in such excess was tyranny
and locked us into its own limits, a polished cell 
reflecting our own faces. God lives 
on the other side of that mirror, 
but through the slit where the barrier doesn’t 
quite touch ground, manages still 
to squeeze in—as filtered light, 
splinters of fire, a strain of music heard 
then lost, then heard again.

---

“Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully. 

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.”

“And he has Brain.”

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”

There was a long silence.

“I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”

---

Jef Sewell, on why Ernest Becker’s ideas are more relevant than ever:

I think that … human denial has never been greater. A pattern of denial of reality itself has just grown.

Iain McGilchrist:

I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation — one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life — the re-presentation is simply what one might call the limit case of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions.

Ernest Becket:

It’s the lie about the world that is killing the world. Everyone’s lie about how the world is that they are using as a defense against reality and the crazy games they play as they lie to defend themselves against the world.

(I’ll happily say again: if you haven’t seen the film All Illusions Must Be Broken, you should.

Life seems a funny thing when reading Winnie the Pooh makes you want to pick up James C. Scott’s latest…

Milne:

BY THE TIME it came to the edge of the Forest, the stream had grown up, so that it was almost a river, and, being grown-up, it did not run and jump and sparkle along as it used to do when it was younger, but moved more slowly. For it knew now where it was going, and it said to itself, “There is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” But all the little streams higher up in the Forest went this way and that, quickly, eagerly, having so much to find out before it was too late.

Scott:

Rivers, on a long view, are alive. They are born; they change; they shift their channels; they forge new routes to the sea; they move both gradually and violently; they teem (usually) with life.… Each river, though subject to the same hydraulic laws, has its own unique personality and history. It makes abundant sense, then, to speak of the life history of a particular river, of its eco-biography. The biography of any river—the Orinoco, the Zambesi, the Mississippi, the Yellow, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Danube, the Ayeyarwady—would be every bit as distinctive as the personal biographies of the various shamans, sages, fishers, philosophers, tyrants, rebels, and saints who lived along their banks.

[…]

The term meander comes to us from an actual river in west central Turkey, the Büyük Menderes, which follows a winding course over a flat plain before entering the Aegean. The Menderes appears in Homer’s Iliad. As a verb in English, the word has come to mean aimless wandering in walking, speaking, or writing. As a technical geological and hydrological term, however, it denotes a distinct nonrandom and rather systematic pattern of movement.

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