Play is not a break from the real world. It is how you discover it, try it on, practice various roles and personas to see if they fit. Play is how you practice the rules and then change them, join in the act of creation, and imagine the world as it could be.
I think too many of us have learned, somewhere along the way, that our faith–in God, in a Higher Power, in the Goodness of the Universe– is a fragile thing, and it can never be played with.
Faith is not to be hugged too tightly or thrown about too freely. It is not open to the reinterpretation of a wild imagination, or to the creative freedom that comes with loosely held rules, for these things might make it unrecognizable or damage our it beyond repair.
We’ve been shown that the shape of our faith as it was handed to us is how it will always be. We’ve been taught that we should work hard to make the edges of our faith stronger, taller, and more clearly defined, in order to protect its soft, fragile insides, but that the shape itself should remain the same. It should never have any more sides, surfaces, or points than it does now.
We’ve been told that our faith needs some repainting now and then, lest it start to seem shabby, but we’ve been warned against mixing colors together, or worse yet, adding new ones, so that we can avoid new colors that have not been properly vetted, or the ultimate sin of creating shades of gray.
We’ve been taught that our faith needs to be held carefully and firmly, displayed and shared with utmost caution, because twisting our faith around to inspect parts of it more closely, or opening it up to see how it works, risks ruining it forever.
We’ve been warned not to toss our faith up in the air to see how high it will go, or to throw it down in frustration and despair, because it might shatter into a million sharp and dangerous pieces. So we keep our faith in sterile, padded environments, trying our best to keep away ideas, questions, and doubts that might rip, tear, or poke even the tiniest hole in it.
But what if our faith isn’t fragile at all? What if it is, and has always been, something stronger than we’ve imagined? What if our faith is more flexible, stretchable, and moldable than we’d ever dreamed? What would you do a faith like that? What COULD you do with a faith like that?
What if those times that you were twisting and reshaping your faith you weren’t damaging it at all, but growing it?
What if all those times you threw your faith to the ground, sometimes unsure if you’d ever bother picking it up, you weren’t destroying it but simply breaking off the things that no longer served you well so that the truer things could emerge?
What if your faith has important pieces to it that you have yet to discover? What if there are pieces that you never knew you needed, and that look so different than anything that was a part of your faith before, but now that you’ve found these pieces you can hardly believe that your faith ever felt home without them?
What if what you needed all along was to play with your faith?
What if your strong and growing faith actually THRIVES in an environment where it is surrounded by new ideas, new possibilities, and new relationships? What if your faith grows best when it has the freedom to try on new ideas and to discard others, and in a grace-filled place where we can sheepishly but shamelessly pick up parts of our faith we had dropped or thrown away and realized that we wanted and needed after all?
What if what your faith really needed as the chance to be too much or too little or to be nothing at all? What if your faith can only be its truest, most grace-filled form when had the opportunity to try on a hundred ways of being–some of which will ultimately prove unhelpful or embarrassing but all of which will be enlightening?
What if we can only be our most authentic, loving, compassionate selves when we have allowed ourselves to play with our faith?
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