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In his article "Play is Foundation for Religion," our friend and colleague Peter Gray provides us with yet more insight into the nature of sacred play.
He says:
A general function of all play is to give meaning to people's lives and to help them cope with the real world. As I described in an earlier post, play helps children come to grips with reality. Playing at being witches and trolls, for example, helps young children think about and understand aspects of their real world that would be hard to understand otherwise. This is true even though the children clearly recognize that the play world is imaginary, not real. In fact, play would not serve its purpose if children did not recognize that distinction.
Religion, properly conceived, is a grand and potentially life-long game in which people use the basic structures of the game—the story outlines, beliefs, and rituals - along with their own creative additions and modifications, to make sense of their real world and real lives. The stories and beliefs may be understood as fictions, but they are sacred fictions because they represent ideas and principles that are crucial to living in the real world and they may be held through all of life.
And then, what happens when religion loses its playfulness:
As religion evolved (or should I say devolved) from the hunter-gatherers' comic pantheons to the medieval monotheisms it became less playful and more dangerous. As nature became an enemy rather than a friend, and as the spirit world became hierarchical, the element of fear began to overwhelm the element of play. God became not a playmate, but the supreme source of punishment and reward, to be worshipped, served, and feared. As religion became serious, people began to confound the imaginary religious world with the real world.
If children playing that they are witches and trolls did not know that they were just pretending, we would worry. We know, for children, that failure to distinguish imagination from reality can be dangerous. We should know that this is even truer in the case of adults and religion.
The religions that emerged with agriculture and feudalism have promoted horrors that would be unimaginable to hunter-gatherers. The Aztecs sacrificed human beings to their angry gods. Christians tortured people they called witches and murdered heathens mercilessly. Today among some groups of Islamists we find promoters of suicide bombings, who put religious beliefs above their concerns for people. If service to God is the highest value, and if God is fearsome and egotistical and punishing, and if religion is confounded with reality, then all these horrors in the name of religion become possible.
His conclusion:
To keep religion on the side of humanity instead of against it, we need continuously to refresh its playfulness. Sacred play promotes the best of our human nature, improves our wellbeing, and is fun. Religion lacking play is suicidal.
I think the idea of "Sacred Play" is especially worth our collective contemplation.
So we go to another source: an article called "Playing Around," by Leanne Ogasawara. In it, she begins with a description of the work of “one of Japan’s greatest linguistic scholars, Shirakawa Shizuka." She explains that he "was fascinated by the concept of ‘play.’ After an impressively long career of studying Chinese characters, he famously declared his most beloved character of all was the kanji for ‘play’ (遊).”
She explains: “he loved the idea freedom inherent to the concept of ‘play’—since he said in ancient times, the idea of ‘freedom’ was thought to be how the gods ‘played’ and lived—in perfect freedom—as an end in itself (like a kiss?).”
She continues, describing the inscription on his memorial stele:
“Play is something sacred. Only the gods could truly play. Play signifies absolute freedom and a rich world of the imagination that existed only for the gods. When people came to access this world of the gods, they too were able to play. And when they played, the gods would come out and join them.”
I think we may be getting closer to accessing the kind of godlike play, of the “perfect freedom” that Shizuka was describing. Perhaps not as a permanent state, but it seems to me that, in play, we are invited to that experience more frequently. That’s certainly true of many of our interactions in the virtual world where we find ourselves perfectly free to engage or disengage in virtual communities, in virtual worlds of play and information, of art and photography, science and philosophy, music and theater.
And not just virtual. Spurred by their success in bringing more playfulness to games, independent game designers and civic organizations are producing large scale public events where we are invited to play freely, without judgment or constraint, for the fun of it.
Though we may not have reached the point of being able to “truly play,” we have more opportunities to “freely play.” And the more opportunities we create in which we are playing playfully, the closer we get to experiencing sacred play. It’s either us, or the gods themselves joining us in play. Playing freely, playfully together, we become the sacred beings we have always been.
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This article originally appeared in Deep Fun
