A UU Ethic of Play by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz, Aug. 16, 2009

A UU Ethic of Play, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz

        When I sat down to write the sermon I had planned for this morning, I discovered something: it’s hard to write about playful things when you’re upset. So before we dive into the advertised topic for this summer Sunday morning, there’s something I need to say about what our overly polite news media are calling the current health care debate.

        What is going on here, people? Right-wing pundits like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan and yes, Sarah Palin, have unleashed a tide of disinformation, and are urging people to “join the mob” and disrupt Town Hall meetings called by members of congress. Some of them have even gotten death threats. These “mobs” have derailed the democratic process around the most serious hope we have to begin to fix the health insurance system that nearly everyone agrees is seriously broken. There is nothing playful about this, but I do get the sense that some members of the “mob” are enjoying it a whole lot.

       Meanwhile, liberal and progressive spokespersons who need to step up to counter this are looking like deer in the headlights.

     What’s behind this behavior? Fear, obviously, but what is it that people are so afraid of?

       The best analysis I’ve seen so far is written by Tim Wise, a white antiracist activist who has written books that have been helpful to me in my own journey to become an antiracist minister, most recently “Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama.” In essays circulating on the Internet, Wise writes that the subtext from those who are disrupting the health care debate is aimed straight at white fear: “it’s not your country anymore;” the subtext goes. “Obama is a black racist who wants to take stuff like good health care away from white people and give it to People of Color, not to mention any future Supreme Court appointments.” This gets additional traction in the nonsense rumors about Obama’s birth certificate, which even some supposedly respectable members of Congress have given credence.

        Whatever your position on the health care proposals, we are called by our faith to speak out against fear mongering, to find the words to name it and to call people to an ethic of love not fear. We are called by our faith to stand on the side of love against any hate speech, especially when it plays on the wound of racism in this nation’s psyche. It takes courage, it takes careful thought, it takes buckets of love, and it takes study, learning the history and understanding the dynamic of racism in this country and even in our own Unitarian Universalist congregations. So I want, at this crucial moment in our nation’s history, to particularly acknowledge the 44 people who are with us today, from our congregation and other UU churches in the area, spending the entire weekend in our 6th Jubilee training to be offered here at UUCA. Could you all stand up please? Good people, we thank you for your work.

        Well. I didn’t know I was going to be speaking so earnestly today about the “health care debate” as it is playing out on the nightly news, but actually, it’s not as far removed from today’s topic as it seems to be. For sure there’s nothing fun about the health care mess, but it is exactly when I encounter the anger and frustration and even fear that arise in me when I watch these news broadcasts that I know I am most in need of lightening up.

        I spent most of my summer break at home, a “stay-cation” as a lot of folks are calling it. I would wake up in the morning, drink a cup of coffee, maybe go to the gym, linger over the New York Times. Every couple of days or so I’d Metro into the district to visit a museum or see one of the monuments I hadn’t had a chance to see in the three years that I’ve lived here. If I felt like it, that is. Pretty much, I followed my own inner promptings. I went out if I wanted to, and if I needed to be a slug with a book or even with a boxed set of “The Vicar of Dibley,” I did it guiltlessly.

        It was deeply renewing.

        What is play? –if you’re a grownup, I mean. If you’re a kid, and if you’re blessed to be growing up in a loving home that isn’t in a war zone, play and life are pretty much indistinguishable. But once we get to be adults, we put away childish things and turn to an ethic of productivity. Right? “Play” becomes something that is marketed to us, like everything else. Sometimes we think we can’t play until we have the perfect tennis togs, a better bicycle, more expensive running shoes. And our play is purposeful! How many calories is it burning? We buy pedometers and heart rate monitors and spend as much time calculating as we do playing.

        Several times a week I go to the gym, and I strap on my iPod and spend an hour there, listening to my favorite music and doing about the same workout every time. It is meditative and therefore restorative, and I AM burning calories, but it isn’t playful. I am more playful writing sermons, because when I sit down to write I let my mind free-associate, sometimes in its own space and sometimes on cyberspace. I look away from the blank screen, look out the window, navigate over to Facebook to see what’s happening there. Finally, following my inner promptings, I begin to write, not knowing where I am going. I have learned that if I short-circuit my procrastination cycle and try to force it, something will get written, but I am not likely to be happy with the process OR the result.

        So what is supposed to be play – going to the gym – is more like work, and what is supposed to be work – writing a sermon – is play. Not always, but often enough. Of course there are hours of preparation too – reading books, looking for articles, thinking about hymns – hours and hours of preparation time, I want you to understand! Depending on how soon my deadline is approaching, this can feel like play as well. How many of you have work that feels like play to you? This is a great blessing.

        In the Hindu religion, all of it is play, all of life, the way it seems to be for children. According to Hindu theology, all Creation is lila, the play of the Gods. Krishna, whose birth festival Hindus celebrate this weekend, is the incarnation of that divine play, roughly analogous to Jesus as the incarnation of the Word in the Christian faith. Krishna is delightfully playful. In one festival held in his honor in Hindu countries, people line up on two sides and throw colored water and colored powders at each other. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

        According to Alan Watts, who was writing around the time of that great playfest 40 years ago called Woodstock, the biggest difference between Hinduism and Christianity is each religion’s answer to the question: “Is it serious?” – “it” being the whole shebang, the Universe, existence, and everything. Christianity says oh my yes, it’s serious. And Hinduism says No – it isn’t serious, it’s lila. It’s play.

        Of course it’s human nature, even for Hindus I suspect, to get trapped in thinking that life is serious, that it’s all painfully for real. But that is maya, illusion, taking ourselves too seriously. Good and evil are just part of the game, and even the gods can’t control or predict the outcome. Doesn’t mean we don’t play hard, give it all we’ve got. But it seems likely that this piece of the Hindu worldview might help keep our own struggles and triumphs in perspective.

        Unitarian Universalism is blessed to draw wisdom from all the world’s great religions, and in this increasingly multicultural congregation are some whose religious background is Hindu. But our Unitarian forbears were Christians of the most serious sort. Dour, even. Unitarianism evolved in Puritan congregations in New England, where parishioners were exhorted to believe that all that was happening to them – and for the earliest members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, that would have included starvation and freezing to death in large numbers – all of it was willed by God, whose pleasure it was to punish them for their sins.

        The Puritans bequeathed to us a work ethic – and that’s a good thing; we have built a great country with that Puritan work ethic. You never hear about the Puritan play ethic; they didn’t have one. So, duh, it is understandable if we UUs are play challenged! I know I am. I aspire to play like Dina, but I know to do that, I have to be intentional about it. I try not to count the number of meetings I have in a given week here at church – not because I hate meetings – often I quite like them – but because I suffer when there is too little unscheduled time left in the week for my mind and spirit to wander freely, paying attention to what I am drawn toward, and what I am moving away from.

        And that quality of play – that freedom of moving where you wish, choosing to follow sometimes, lead sometimes, experimenting, making mistakes, and then paying attention to what you are moving toward and away from – that is a basic way we discern our spiritual path. Play is essential, in my opinion, for a spiritual life.

        Play is also necessary for psychological health, for renewal, and certainly, certainly for creativity. That’s why I have had to consciously develop a practice of play, play that – unlike my sermon-writing time – involves my body as well as my intellect. The InterPlay practice that Dina has introduced to us today is one of the ways I make room for play in my life. It’s simple stuff, done in a community of playful people -- leading and following; walking, running and standing still; letting my mouth say whatever pops into my mind in a kind of play called babbling.  JD and I are both InterPlayers, and JD will be leading an InterPlay workshop at the church in October. Well actually, they call it a “playshop,” not a “workshop.” You can pick up a flyer on the back table if you’re interested.

        Now our Puritan Unitarian ancestors may have interpreted every hardship as a sign of God’s displeasure, but we also have in our heritage a Universalism that focuses on the joy of God’s love for God’s creation, and for God’s created beings, that is, us. Early American Universalists rejected the dour Calvinism of the Puritans and worshipped a God who was too loving to punish, a God who saved the world by sending Jesus as an example of perfect love. By modeling our actions on this perfectly loving human being, Jesus, we invite joy into our lives, the Universalists believed. In trying to be like Jesus, we would naturally follow the path of love and not the path of fear, and learn to be good by following the goodness of our own hearts.

       This is like the elevated state of grace that Dina spoke of in her “I believe” statement – feeling at one with the playful energy of the cosmos, a deep knowing beyond intellect of our connectedness as part of the Interdependent Web of All Existence, a sense that leads us naturally to care for one another and for the Earth. Yes, we must stand up and speak our truth when political leaders would take us down a path toward racism and oppression, a path of fear instead of love. We take this obligation to stand on the side of love very seriously. But the more we play, the more we allow our hearts and minds to experience that state of deep connectedness, the more we are able to speak up naturally, without fear and anger, to speak the truth of loving kindness, to act out of the goodness that is in us and in all of everything.

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