Live Playfully

Last updated on: December 10, 2016 at 8:45 am by Marilyn McEntyre

Live Playfully 2016-12-10T08:45:14-07:00 Marilyn McEntyre

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Peter Matthiesson’s lovely title, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, rings a happy change on a metaphor that has motivated hundreds of Christian missionaries to venture into foreign places, understanding themselves as laborers in the fields of the Lord. I grew up with my parents’ memories of years working “on the mission field” in India, not recognizing the term as an agricultural metaphor until well into adult life. Those same kindly parents took me to prayer meetings where we occasionally sang the 19th-century hymn, “Work for the Night is Coming,” based on John 9:4: “As long as it is day, I must do the work of him that sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.”

The emphasis on working, laboring, expending one’s energies in God’s service, is part of a legacy I still value, misdirected though some of those energies have been where evangelism has been entangled with colonialism. That work ethic, no doubt, accounts for my father’s frequent query as we sat on the floor playing Monopoly, “Why aren’t you doing something useful?” And my mother’s cheerful plan for her days on this earth: “Honey, when I’m not useful any more, I just want to go.” They were faithful people, and not without their own kind of playfulness and humor, but it wasn’t until early adulthood that I came to appreciate play, also, as a calling. The Lord’s fields might be places where one could toss a ball around or hide and seek.

David James Duncan’s title, God Laughs and Plays, was worth the price of the book to me before I even began to peruse its rich, provocative, insightful pages. Subtitled “Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right,” the book is a collection of musings that reclaim God’s image and the Gospel’s message from those who have darkened them with human judgments and stringent moral strictures—including an overwrought work ethic. The playfulness of Duncan’s prose, and of Annie Dillard’s and of Billy Collins’ poetry and even Emily Dickinson’s, offers a sprightly, inspiring reminder that play is a form of intelligence. It is also a form of thanksgiving, and of praise, and of fidelity. With respect to that fidelity, Stephen Nachmanovich writes in Free Play, “When we are totally faithful to our own individuality, we are actually following a very intricate design.” Play is a response to a summons we all receive: discover who you are, where your curiosities lead you, what gives you life and joy, what lies within you waiting to be brought forth.

As I grow older I recognize that the people I have most admired and learned from are all playful people. They experiment. They feel the “spur of the moment” and respond. They try out alternative points of view. They pretend for the sheer pleasure of peering down a road not taken. And their capacity for intense, focused, productive work is sustained by a wisdom that allows them to suspend that work for a whole afternoon while they throw a ball around with a ten-year-old or hide behind trees waiting to be found, or sit cross-legged on the floor in front of a game board, caring less about the outcome than about the little opponents for whom this time bound and perhaps trivial contest has the look of love.

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