Page 9 - The Circle / July 2016

has done, I also reference play, love, and contemplation. If I speak of play, as Johan Huizinga or Brian Sutton-Smith did, I also mean flow, love, and contemplation. If I speak of love as St. Paul did in I Corinthians 13, I also mean flow, play, and contemplation. If I speak of contemplation as Richard of St. Victor did I also mean flow, play, and love.
The reason I claim that flow, play, love, and contemplation are the four dimensions of a single process is because they have approximately the same structure. This similarity suggests that the dimensions have evolved from a common source, which I further suggest is the wonder of the infant, who first creates the creative process out of necessity to know the world within and the world beyond itself. This creating of knowledge begins with wonder.
The child’s creation of the creative process is unified and involves the whole child, but as childhood progresses this fundamental process is differentiated into four dimensions, each with its own vocabulary and seemingly independent function. Sometimes in later life the four dimensions are integrated to reveal our true nature. Our true nature, as the Hebrew sages told us in Genesis, is to be a creator like God, whose image we carry within us.
THE GOAL OF GODLY PLAY
When Christian language is used to invite the making of existential meaning through the creative process, it must involve our whole being because it is our whole being which is at stake in an existential situation. The goal of Godly Play
is to help children (and adults) by the grace of God to steer into the deep channel of the river of life, where our authentic identity flows. The image of the river flowing between its banks points to a kind of maturity that we can learn from children, as Jesus suggested, and then share with them. This reinforces their fundamental kind of knowing in us and in them from generation to generation.
In the deep channel of the creative process, we live our authentic identity as we flow between the banks of rigidity and chaos without getting stuck in either. If we can stay in touch with both the form and openness of the river’s edges without getting splashed out and left high and dry on either bank, then we can enter a maturity that is beyond the norm of accumulated years and enter a “state,” which is both political and personal, that Jesus called “The Kingdom of Heaven.” Moving in this deep channel is how we can flow out from God and return to the Creator. Living and dying in this deep current is how and why Godly Play aspires to be “grounded openness.” C
I founded Godly Play with my wife, Thea. We worked together almost from the time we met in 1960 in Princeton until her death in 2009. Thea was a student at Westminster Choir College, and I was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary when we met.
A GODLY PLAY QUARTERLY PUBLICATION 9