The Grace of Playing

Pedagogies for Leaning into God's New Creation

Goto

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781498273916
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Believers and teachers of faith regularly know the in-breaking of God's Spirit in their midst, when revelatory experiencing unexpectedly shifts habits of thinking, feeling, and doing toward more life-giving ways of being and becoming. When the moment is right, Spirit breathes new life into dry bones. Though religious educators have much practical wisdom about facilitating learning that is creative and transformative, sharper concepts, cases, and theory can help them do it more critically and assist learners to practice openness to wonder, surprise, and authenticity. The Grace of Playing explains how we can create the conditions for revelatory experiencing by understanding it in light of playing. The notion of playing "as if" can be powerfully reclaimed from ecclesial ambivalence, casual speech, and commercial interests that often lead playing to be associated with childishness, frivolity, or entertainment. This book theorizes adults playing for the sake of faith, drawing on D. W. Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory, a revision of Jurgen Moltmann's theology of play, biblical texts, medieval devotional practices, as well as art and aesthetics that help local faith communities engage in theological reflection. Communal forms of playing in/at God's new creation provide insights into pedagogies in which learners are creating and are created anew.

chapter 1

Introduction

When God’s new creation shines through moments of teaching and learning, participants in a learning community experience a shift in awareness that draws them in and allows them to perceive what had until then been imperceptible. At a conference, an improvisational theater troupe listens to a man in the audience who shares his story of the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa.1 The group dramatizes the story for the teller in a moving performance of empathy, which feels poignant and powerful. Other revelatory experiencing unfolds in a seminary classroom, where students sculpt God images from clay and share what they mean in the context of their lives. A student remarks that it “felt like we were doing church.” Different revelatory experiencing emerges in the midst of a gospel concert, where the Holy Spirit moves both singers and congregants. People clap, dance, and sing with hearts made open, glad, and alive through praise.

In all of these instances, one might ask what is going on, why experiencing is revelatory one time but not another, and what the resemblances are between these examples. One wonders how to account for what is happening in different contexts, at different times, and in different ways. One might begin to ask what we might do to facilitate this kind of breakthrough learning rather than hoping and waiting for it to occur.

Ethnographic research of communities playing within and beyond the church provoked my own pondering about these questions. In one case, I began to re-see practices of the Japanese American church of my childhood in light of another case study—a community of adults, who engage in InterPlay. Teaching people improvisational techniques of dance, theater, and vocal music, InterPlay is an organization, educational philosophy, and a technique that encourages spontaneous artistic expressions of what feels true in the moment. InterPlay is a spiritual but not religious community; some engage InterPlay as a spiritual practice, others as a life practice.

While I was engaged in fieldwork, I did not have as much theoretical language for what I was observing and participating in as I do now. My early work was focused on thick descriptions of my case studies. The Grace of Playing grew out of a need to understand my fieldwork in psychoanalytic, theological, historical, and aesthetic terms. When I began writing, I intended to include full ethnographic studies to reflect my research method as a practical theologian. I could not have written this book without my fieldwork and critical reflection on it. However, in the process of writing I discovered that the subject of playing requires more rigorous, methodical theorizing about playing than I had anticipated. I discuss examples from the case studies in the latter part of the book, but the major work of this volume is about developing analytic tools for excavating those case studies through multiple perspectives of playing. The real project has been to clarify what I mean by revelatory experiencing, why a discussion of playing leads us to deeper understanding of creating conditions for revelatory experiencing, and why religious education needs this. With the theoretical groundwork laid in this book, I can imagine the reader being prepared to delve into ethnographic case studies of communities playing for the sake of faith. However, case studies must be saved for another book.

Curtis Thompson has used the metaphor of translucence to describe how encounters with art can mediate experiences of the holy;2 the same analogy can be used to describe profound experiencing in religious education. These are times when an everyday instance of religious education becomes “thinner” or translucent, allowing the divine mystery to be seen and felt shining through the experience of being together. It can happen in the context of liturgy, Bible study, serving others, or the many other forms that religious education take. Not all the time, but once in a while learners and teachers register “something more.” That experience often prompts one to be with others in new ways, leaving them unexpectedly changed.3 The experience of this “something more” prompts a different kind of learning than memorizing facts, performing rote actions, or making calculations. Revelatory experiencing is more personal, compelling, and uncanny than other learning. It often addresses what is needed in the moment for more abundant living and what cannot be sought directly because it was not previously known. Revelatory experiencing feels both full of grace and given by grace. It feels as if God is addressing learners individually as well as collectively. There is conscious recognition of grace in our midst because we receive what is life-giving even when we are unaware of the seeking. Participants often feel bound together by this unexpected gift. Not only have they shared a momentous way of being that is difficult to describe to those who were not present, they sense that it was facilitated in part by being together in ways that cannot be replicated. In short, human beings hunger for revelatory experiencing because it is of God, it calls deeply to us, and it summons to awareness what is usually unrecognized. Yet revelatory experiencing can neither be predicted nor demanded.

Revelatory experiencing causes in learners a destabilizing and re-orienting shift in awareness or feeling that allows them to encounter divine mystery, themselves, and others in new, life-giving ways. Revelatory experiencing presupposes practices that decenter habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing, both individually and together, which opens up possibilities for re-centering. Decentering and re-centering are not simply done to learners but with them. The relationships that are formed and sustained in revelatory experiencing allow learners to participate in the unfolding of the learning process. Learners are not simply given what is needed; they contribute to a process that precipitates the creative emergence of something of God that needs to be perceived.

A theoretical challenge for understanding revelatory experiencing is that there are neither precise nor accurate words to concretize or hold it up for examination. In fact, the more one attempts to parse what is going on in revelatory experiencing, the more the embodied memory and wonder of translucence seems to dissipate. While theoretical discussions thrive on specificity and sharpness, any description of revelatory experiencing is inherently vague, like telling someone who has never seen snow what it is like to ski. One can only grasp experience by analogy and association, by aiming as close as possible in words, knowing that the words do not land solidly or precisely on target.

I use the language of revelatory experiencing rather than revelatory experiences with some intention. Revelatory experiences suggest peak or prized events or states of being that should be sought because they are intrinsically rewarding. There is a danger of approaching revelatory experiences as if they were something to have and assuming that the more experiences one accumulates the better. Instead, the notion of revelatory experiencing is meant to convey a process of living into deeper and more authentic ways of being and being with one another. Instead of “having” a certain kind of experience happen to me, my being and being with others and Spirit is an open-ended process that involves invitation and participation.

A primary task of religious education is to help form and transform people to create a more just and peaceful world. This is what grounds my understanding of revelatory experiencing. In particular, I understand Christian religious education to be systems that cultivate habits and dispositions that align with the ways of Jesus—ways that liberate, heal, and bind together individuals and communities. Gabriel Moran and Maria Harris call this “teaching the way,”4 and Jack Seymour entitles his volume on Christian education Teaching the Way of Jesus.5 However, as a Japanese American practical theologian, I am sensitive to there being multiple ways of understanding Jesus’ life and teachings and numerous ways of practicing Christian faith. Practices of faith are essential to forming habits and “dispositions”6 that characterize Christian living appropriate to a particular context. Practices of religious education shape the faithful both formally, informally, intentio...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Series Foreword
• Editors’ Preface
• Author’s Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Playing Social Scientifically: The Meanings of Playing
• Chapter 3: Playing Theologically: Leaning into God’s New Creation
• Chapter 4: Playing Historically: Medieval Practices
• Chapter 5: Playing Aesthetically: Rethinking Our Grounds for Playing
• Chapter 6: Towards a New Creation
• Bibliography