“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 18:3 No, I’m not a theologian. But I am fascinated by Jesus, enough to capitalize His pronouns. I’m an agnostic Jesus freak, and the above passage fascinates me more than anything He said.
I heard several preachers offer their take on this biblical passage. One preacher in particular irritated the heaven out of me, interpreting the passage to mean a call to obedience. Oh really? Whom do I obey? One preacher’s interpretation, institutionalized religion? No thank you. Im not inclined to treat such koans so generically, especially given the rampant hypocrisy exhibited by the very institutions that espouse such teachings. I prefer to dig deeper for their meaning.
I don’t think Jesus was talking about obedience. After all, wasn’t He put to death precisely because He was disobedient? No, I think He was talking about the spirit of play, a spirit best embodied by a child.
That’s the spirit many of us tend to lose as we ”grow-up”. We have good reasons for this. Life is hard.
But that’s all the more reason for us to reinvigorate life, as hard as it is, with this spirit of play? This mindset shift cuts against the pressure to GROW UP. I‘d like to confront that pressure here by playing with it.
When we play, we enter into what Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called FLOW. This is a state of intense focus where you are so immersed in an activity that you lose a sense of self consciousness and time. I’m sure you can think of a time where this flow state was real for you, maybe playing video games, or an athletic activity, writing poetry, or making love.
I see this flow state as an embodiment of the spirit of a child. Have you seen them at play, how focused they are, how they invent silly games and surrender entirely to the activity? How brilliantly they roll down hills, build sand castles, and twirl for no particular reason.
They know better than us crusty adults how to play games. But at some point in our adolescence, the system wraps around us like a snake to squeeze that spirit of play out of us. While we once we had a knack to find the fun in almost anything, institutions step in to claim ownership of that spiritual capital. Our natural curiosity for the wonders of the world become replaced by a quest for grades. Our innate desire for contributing to a community becomes a war for prestige, and the cultivation of meaningful friendship becomes a quest for subscribers.
Waiting are the gatekeepers to this spiritual capital, eager to take ownership of that sense of play. So they create competitive rituals around it as they lord over some constructed hierarchy. Parents often push their child into such hierarchical rituals, using their child as a proxy for their own wish fulfillment. And so they say, “you must focus Billy, life isn’t all fun and games.”
On some level, our constructed hierarchies are useful, even necessary. The problem arises when we give them God-like status, when we start to worship the hierarchy. We see the hierarchy as something to measure ourselves against, and “growing up“ as a function of living up to those metrics. I mean what else could we do? Life is hard, it’s dangerous out there. So grow up!
Surely there is some wisdom to that realist’s sentiment. But let’s flip it on its head for fun and say…
It’s dangerous out there, so you better reclaim your childlike spirit of play.
That is, in order to engage with reality effectively, we need to apply focused energy toward it; we need to access the flow states that facilitate encounters with the hard realities of the human experience.
”Of all the virtues we can learn, no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge.”
— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
This is not an escape from the problems of the world, but a sustainable way to face them. It’s not appropriate for a child to be exposed to all of these problems, but it is essential that adults confront them. Hierarchical rituals and rules can be useful tools to polish us in becoming competent members of society, but not if they becoming all rigid or all-encompassing. Tools are not Gods.
And it helps to be reminded that some who have reached the top of these hierarchies have done so because they did the impossible; they’ve reclaimed a sense of play in spite of a system set up to destroy it. Take it from the lips of a painter.
With Picasso, we encounter a paradox. In order to acquire the skills necessary to become a master, he had to, in a sense, ”grow up.” He needed to learn and respect the rules. But in order to become a true master, he had to reclaim the spirit of a child, a spirit of one who breaks them. Thus, to become a master, he had to become a child. And as painters go, what’s at stake is full access to the range of his or her humanity as expressed in paint. These are ultimate stakes. Becoming a person requires the same process.
But it’s important to illuminate the psycho-spiritual resources needed to go through this process. As it pertains to life, I’m arguing that the “spirit of play” is our most precious resource needed to uplift us in the face of life’s inevitable tragedies.
Albeit counterintuitive, I’m suggesting a reframing of the realist perspective. It’s about the fuel. What better spiritual fuel have we than the spirit of play. Sure, we can address difficulty by breaking it down into smaller manageable difficulties, but isn’t it more psychologically sustainable to break it down into smaller games to which we can approach the task with a sense of flow? Mastery cannot be fueled by drudgery, but by flow.
What I’m confronting here is our deeply ingrained puritan ethic of hard work, which is rooted in a kind of religious neuroticism. This neuroticism sees people as loathsome sinners whose only means of reconciling with the divine is through arduous self-sacrificial work. Or consider it’s Calvinist variant which compels people to neurotically and ironically attempt to demonstrate their piety by working themselves to exhaustion. Maybe then they can earn their place among the elect, a status that has already been predetermined.
These Christian strands, however, don’t seem to consider Matthew 18:3 in their spiritual calculation. Far from changing and becoming like children, they guilt themselves into greater rigidity to the point of obsession. Doesn‘t much of our workaholism in todays world echo these puritan sentiments? I’d say so. But it needn’t have a Christian component.
Secular workaholics can devote decades of drudgery with the magical thinking that someday they can retire and spend the scant remainder of their lives on that yacht they always wanted — a secular heaven. Either they’ll get it or not, but to think that sipping Mai Tais on a yacht at sunset is adequate compensation for renouncing three quarters of your life to the drudgery of workaholism is frankly stupid.
Instead, it’s important to scrutinize the reverberations of this puritan work ethic, and reinvigorate our work with a sense of play that prioritizes the actuallity of the now over the fantasy of the someday.
Otherwise, we are prone to compensate our need for play with all sorts of wicked rituals. Isn‘t it realistic to say that many of us fill that growing spiritual hole with empty addictions to liquor, food, sex, ambition, righteousness.
And isn’t that like us silly humans, to pronounce our lofty allegiances to ethical standards and rigid hierarchies in public before we crawl our way back to our hidden little pleasure bubbles of pain pills, and porn, and booze, and heroine needles, and mindless entertainment, and meth pipes, and potato chips. I’ll admit to partaking in one or more of these.
And they’re great aren’t they; they‘re fun! But it’s an empty fun. After the transient rush, all that addictions feed is the addiction. Addictions don’t reverberate through expanding spheres of relationship. They’re not a portal into the creative process, rather a cheap, amusing exit out of it. In other words, they are not an entry into the heaven I take Jesus to have meant when He compelled us to “…change and become like little children.”
Maybe if we ”changed” in such a way, we wouldn’t need our addictions as much. Of course much would be lost by those gatekeepers who profit off those addictions.
But it’s our lives we are talking about! Isn’t it time we reclaim the creative process in us all, one fueled by spontaneity and joy? If we are to do this, we must hack at the the root of our rigid conception with work and our hallow pronouncements of self-sacrifice.
If I’m honest, at 45 years of age, in many ways I have participated in these rigid conceptions. Play is not something that comes naturally. But I’m trying to find a way back. Maybe it would serve us all if we found a way back to the bliss we knew when our spirit of play called us to roll down hills, build sand castles, and twirl for no particular reason.
Mike Greca
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