Life as work…Life as play

Over the past year or so I have grown acutely aware that I am at best, a passionate person with high hopes and high expectations and longings for things that seem so out of my reach. The elusive PhD, for example, which is elusive once more, or at least the matriculation of it is. I have made an attempt at getting into a PhD program for the past 3 years, and all three years it has, for some odd reason or another, failed to come to pass. The first year I was pissed. Last year I was devastated. And this year…I’m un-phased. I’ll just try again next year. At best I am passionate about life and learning, about teaching, and books, and people’s stories and the way those stories are told. At worst, I guess I’m probably a workaholic. Lest anyone think I have labeled myself too quickly, I have been thinking about this for about 2 or so years, engaging into dialogue with some, praying about it as well. Fortunately, my workaholism doesn’t manifest itself in working long hours & neglecting my family, and it’s not motivated by money or acquiring things (I work in non-profit). The unfortunate part, is that I never fully feel at leisure…never can get comfortable at playing. I’ve always worked hard at my leisure activity. Reading, for example. I enjoy it, though my enjoyment comes from the knowledge I gain, the understanding that grows, or the way someone writes to touch my soul—and touches it again on the next page. When I pick up a book, I want something from it….I know it has something to give and I work hard to get it.

I think a lot of my spiritual journey right now is trying to find, not the balance, but the fullness of both work and play. A friend of mine asked me whether he thought my issue was a problem in my anthropology, or a problem in my theology—I guess I’m not sure. Which is why I have been thinking about it…and not writing.

I remember one of the first poems I wrote had a stanza that read something to the effect of feeling as though I had my own thumb pushing into my back—pushing me forward with some unknown force. A complex visual, I know…but an effective metaphor. In grade school, I would recopy my homework if I noticed too many smudges across the page, the curse of the left-hander writing with a cheap pen. I had to get it just right…it needed to look good, not for the teacher or my friends…but for me. I suppose all the discussions about “significance” and “identity” are apropos here, but I’ll leave those unaddressed, particularly because I’ve been thinking about those issues for over 15 years now, not least because I wrote the poem about the thumb in my back when I was twelve, and still can’t figure out whether my seemingly unwarranted drive for not only “contributing”, but doing so with as much perfection as I can muster, is something broken in me that is in the process of being made whole, or something that’s been given to me in order to make me feel as inadequate as I do right now for a task so simple as “being at leisure.” I guess it can be both. And right now I am feeling both inadequate, and praying for more play in my life.

I’m struck by how much I can relate to G.K. Chesterton when he says:

“I think the name of leisure has come to cover three totally different things. The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.”

Chesterton wrote over 100 books in his lifetime and I guess I can’t imagine him very frequently doing “nothing.” I think I have fallen into a trap, along with the rest of our country. It’s a trap that believes that being busy is always good, and that doing nothing…well…amounts to nothing. Every time I try to do nothing…I fight the guilt of it and then rationalize that my nothingness, my lack of contribution to the world at this moment in time is actually contributing some value…to someone, or something other than myself—which seems to me to strip it of meeting the qualifications of leisure altogether. It seems to me that in order to really be “playing,” my activity would need to not have some utilitarian value…but good just in and of itself.

I’m recognizing my need for more “playing.” I think I’m longing for the enjoyment of having literature and story and yes even music, as illiterate as I feel in it—to wash over me with it’s creative power and help me play—which for some reason I have forgotten how to do and have left sitting alone somewhere back in my childhood. Somewhere between “kick the can” on the culdisac and catching fireflies when the sun goes down. My daughter drinks deeply from a played life…and with each tea party to which I am invited where she seems to have the patience for filling up my cup over and over again, I’m being drawn into that play…and it’s beginning to touch some part of me that I have tucked away.

One is a lonely number…

“It is surely a fact of inexhaustible significance that what our Lord left behind Him was not a book, nor a creed, nor a system of thought, nor a rule of life, but a visible community. He committed the entire work of salvation to that community. It was not that a community gathered round an idea, so that the idea was primary and the community secondary. It was that a community called together by the deliberate choice of the Lord Himself, and re-created in Him, gradually sought – and is seeking – to make explicit who He is and what He has done. The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.”
—Lesslie Newbigin

I’ve been reading some essays and thoughts by British missionary/pastor Lesslie Newbigin.
I spoke a few days ago to a friend of mine who seems disconnected, depressed, disengaged from life and love and faith.

About eight years ago now I went through a period of my life that still seems hazy. I wasn’t drugs…Life and love really. Pain and loss. Idolatry and withrawal. All the making of a full-blown depression. I remember that during this time I was a banquet server downtown at the convention center. It was a big building and many of the events were big enough that I could slip away un-noticed, find an empty room, and cry for God knows what and how long. I was embarrassed by the fact that I’d be in the middle of working, serving up some hot plate of chicken and sauce with vegetable medley to a table of ten at a black-tie affair—and the tears would arrive sometime before coffee and dessert.

I lived with 5 other guys in an apartment near campus. I’d go to class sometimes, until halfway through the quarter I dropped a few of those classes and found my respite in the bottom of a cup of coffee and 10 feet deep inside my soul. Most who knew me knew I was in depression, they knew it by the depth of my eyes and the fact that I had lost about 15 pounds and wasn’t eating all that much. No one knew what to say. Neither did I. I remember telling a friend of mine, “I don’t think I’m doing so well.” —he still didn’t know what to say.

I have suffered to know what it was about me, or my tears, that made it so hard for those around me to speak something into my life. I felt so alone because it seemed no one understood the depth of pain and loss that I was feeling, albeit somewhat irrational. I wasn’t sure what I was to say to my friend this week. So I prayed with him. I didn’t pray for him, though he has come to my mind to do so since then. I prayed with him. I read a psalm and prayed it with him. I think it was about God’s protection against enemies…and deliverance from those who seek our life. I prayed Mary’s prayer, the Magnificant, which says in part that…“my soul exalts in the Lord, my spirit has rejoiced in God my savior for he has been mind-full of the humble state of his bondservant…” I’m not sure if me and my friend trying to find our place in the story of David being hunted by enemies and the story of Mary finding out that she is with child, has anything to do with the conversation about the complexity of faith , but I think it might. Depression makes faith so hard, makes the leap seem so far and unappealing. I know in part that our business in life with one another, helping friends through depression and offering shoulders (not answers) for crying at funerals, has something to do with helping one another along and leaping together. In this, I echo Leslie Newbigin: “The actual community is primary; the understanding of what it is comes second.”

a possesive pronoun

I thought quite a bit about my girls today.  Rayli is beginning to use such big words…stringing them together as though she had planned all day to use a big word and hoping too that I would notice.   I’m sure she doesn’t quite care—but complete sentences for a two-year-old who uses correct tense in her verbs is indeed quite impressive.  I pulled into the driveway today and Jaime and the girls were outside in the driveway.  “My daddy’s home.” she said.   It was the first time, that I can remember, that she used the 1st person possesive pronoun in reference to me..I was ’something’ to ‘her.’   
I have long called her, “my little mocha,” or “daddy’s girl.”  She has never said that I am “Rayli’s daddy” or “my big hero.”  For some reason, two-year-olds only use possesives for stickers and blankies…but I made the cut today…entered into something special to her…something she wanted to label as belonging to her.  

I felt the weight of fatherhood in all of this.