Kindle Notes & Highlights
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September 17 - September 21, 2021
experiencing. For centuries, religious educators have drawn on creative inspiration and practical wisdom to facilitate such revelatory experiencing that deeply moves learners. Missionaries
All such efforts reflect a yearning for a more “holistic, lived-experience model of education,”5 one that builds on the ideas of George Albert Coe, Sophia Lyon Fahs, William Clayton Bower, and others.6 Already in 1929 Coe argued, “[W]e cannot maintain vital continuity
and creative learning.11 Rather than adopting a schooling model in which learning is separated from the rest of life,12 some religious educators have called for an understanding of the “congregation as educator,” in which the entire life of the congregation and its practices serve as opportunities for Christian formation.13
Yes 100% yes not seperate from life but in it - all of our life as a congregation informs the rest of our lives
However, I am perhaps less like an earlier generation of theorists, including Coe, who took more interest in human experience and less interest in divine revelation.29 Instead I follow the example of other religious educators such as Harrison Elliot, Gabriel Moran, and Maria Harris who have taken seriously the role of revelation as integral to religious education, while still accounting for human experiencing.30 In
Revelation - what does that mean
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
Doing church - always a surprise
InterPlay
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
Art and education as mediator for the holy
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.
Destabilizing - ultimately experiencing the holy
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.
Experiencing - more open ended - about process not about a singular experience.
A primary task of religious education is to help form and transform people to create a more just and peaceful world. This
Religiousbesucation is ultimately about justice
revelation. Revelation in its most exalted form happens to someone, as in Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus. The focus in revelation is on God’s salvific action in which God acts as the agent, even though revelation remains a human experience. In contrast, revelatory experiencing draws attention to the human role in preparing for, receiving, and participating in processes of Spirit. While revelations can speak to or have significance for the whole of humanity for all time, revelatory experiencing intimately involves particular learners in a particular time and place. These ordinary
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The road to damascus is well and good but it is more about process and continuation and human experience. Not singular events.
To explore revelatory experiencing, one could use the language of “religious experience,” “flow experiences,” or “aesthetic experience.”19 Alternatively, as this book proposes, one can turn to the language of “playing.” Each of these rhetorics has strengths and limitations in opening up revelatory experiencing to greater view. None
Language of playing
This concept is wide-reaching in that flow-producing activities include not only art but religion and play. The language of flow provides a close account for some revelatory experiencing, for example as it occurs sometimes in playing sports.23
Language of flow
When I use the term aesthetics, I refer to “that dealing with sensory perception and rooted in the body,” which Alexander Baumgarten calls “natural aesthetics.”30 Other theorists take a more narrow approach, using the notion of aesthetics to discuss perception, interpretation, and experience of objects or works of art.
Aesthetics as relating yo yhe body and experience not just art in of itself
knowing.31 Because religious education in its many forms is not simply cognitive but also affective and sensual, a broader understanding of aesthetics as bodily experience is helpful though incomplete without a theological nuancing. Theological aesthetics, understood as “what moves the human heart,”32 helps to frame sense perception in terms of spiritual response and formation.
Religious education is sensual!
Economic interests reinforce a persistent, distorted, but seductive notion of what playing is. Play (and all the stuff needed to play) has been commodified, packaged, and marketed to appeal to all sectors. Small
In contrast, religious education addresses both individual and communal formation in multiple contexts. There
Some of the most challenging work of religious education is not only to help the faithful to learn what is godly but also to unlearn patterns that keep them from living fully. For these reasons, psychoanalytic theory is key.
Like many other forms of human experiencing (e.g., love), playing defies definition because one cannot easily encapsulate the essence of playing (if there is such a thing). Furthermore, one cannot divorce one’s subjectivity
experiencing is needed to make clear the roles of feeling and conceptualizing in the process of making the term playing meaningful.
To play is to experience losing and finding oneself in engaging reality and one another “as if,” exploring freely a world of possibilities bounded by structure that facilitates relationship. This is a descriptive approach to convey the meanings of playing. This characterization offers multiple terms, stimulating experiential memories that enrich the meanings of the symbol playing.
Upon reflection, a player might conclude: “When I am playing, I feel most like myself,” or “I have felt something of God.”
playing. First, playing is grounded in the practice of being creative, using one’s imagination and other resources to do so. When a person re-imagines in order to see things
Yes!
Second, playing involves the practice of abiding by the structures of playing, which are given to or created by the players themselves.55
Third, playing together includes the practice of sensing and responding to other players, which builds a sense of community.56
Fourth, playing involves the practice of being open to surprise and wonder, cultivating this as a habit in participants.57 As poiesis, playing brings into existence something
Playing involves and encourages the practice of wonder. Wonder is “feeling excited by an encounter with something novel and unexpected, something that strikes a person as intensely real, true, or beautiful.”59 Experiences
Wonder
First, “escapist” perspectives on playing assume that playing is a human activity that results in nothing being learned. Understood
86 Other theorists understand the importance of childhood playing in self-teaching. Jean Piaget traces through the span of childhood what a child learns through imitation, the use of symbols, and games with rules.87 Erik Erikson investigates the role of playing in allowing children to master reality by planning and experiencing model situations, while being protected from real-life consequences and norms.88
Play - self teaching erik erikson piaget among others
In the case of children, the freer the conditions for playing, the more likely they are to “increase[e] flights of reversibility, to cultural parody and amusement” that move toward a changing reality.98 Adult forms of playing, including ritual, sporting events, celebrations, and performances, allow for the “recapitulation” of the balance between primary and secondary emotions.99 Secondary
story. Believers don the surprise and wonder of the characters of Advent and are formed by the practice of it. Although the outcome of the story is known, the faithful open themselves to the surprise that it might bring. They hope to satisfy a longing to see and experience Christ anew—that Jesus will be born afresh in their hearts.
We do a good job wiyh wonder at advent. Need to work on other periods in our calendar.
When Christians are playing together, they are playing at/in God’s new creation—where the faithful lose themselves in exploring a world of possibilities in Christ so that they might live into them more fully. In playing at the new creation, Christian communities attempt to create the world to which Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection point—a place where all of creation can live in justice, harmony, and authenticity. In this play world lit by the Gospel, Christians are called to engage in the creative act of seeing one another truly as brothers and sisters in Christ. In the Eucharist (a
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Playing in a new creation
When Christians are playing together, they are playing at/in God’s new creation—where the faithful lose themselves in exploring a world of possibilities in Christ so that they might live into them more fully. In playing at the new creation, Christian communities attempt to create the world to which Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection point—a place where all of creation can live in justice, harmony, and authenticity. In this play world lit by the Gospel, Christians are called to engage in the creative act of seeing one another truly as brothers and sisters in Christ. In the Eucharist (a
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Eucharist - a form of player
Religion and other forms of cultural experience provide a space in which the faithful are invited to experience true self in response to the presence of others and the Spirit of God. In the drama of acting and believing “as if,” the faithful are coaxed by Spirit to venture forth, to forget themselves, and to engage in irresistible play with sacred objects, images, music, texts and memory.
Cultural experience - true self - Spirit of God
Moltmann writes, “[T]he premises from which these replies have been written are not the same as my own—not in the least. . . . I am at a loss as to what to answer to these three American [theological] approaches to play. The authors and I live in the same one world, and yet in completely different inner spaces.”150 Moltmann was baffled that he was “not playing in the same ballpark” as his colleagues.151 In
Moltmann was concerned about distinguishing Christian faith from social activism, lest faith be reduced to justifying political aims.152
) Linking play with beauty, celebration, and expression, play is an aesthetic “world symbol” for Moltmann. He writes, “Play as world symbol goes beyond the categories of doing, having, and achieving and leads us into the categories of being, of authentic human existence and demonstrative rejoicing in it.”156
Moltmann refers to being with and for the oppressed, which means being in joyous solidarity with those who are suffering. His interest in mutuality and empowerment as opposed to charity is striking. Like
He argues, “Play should liberate, not tranquilize, awaken, and not anesthetize. Liberating play is protest against the evil plays of the oppressor and the exploiter. Thus play seriously and fight joyously!”162
I also find it helpful that Moltmann identifies the church as a key place for the kind of liberative playing he describes. He calls the church to be a “testing ground” of the kingdom of God.
Testing ground - the church
He links human playing with the play of the creator, believing both are expressions of free will and pleasure. Associating play mainly with joy and pleasure is understandable given his search for a strong antidote to what robs people of hope, but an understanding of playing that lacks texture does not ring true of the kingdom. While
206 Love is a key theme for much of Moltmann’s work. He argues that God limits Godself in creating the world, so that God’s beloved creatures have freedom to become.207 From my perspective, love provides a broader, more robust frame for understanding God’s purpose for creating the world. Love can still account for God’s playful pleasure and free will in creating, but as I argue below, love is a fuller, more convincing explanation for the relationship between play and the resurrection, as well as play and God’s new creation.
Love to become
An important metaphor for Christian life is the play of love, in which human beings play hide-and-seek with the Holy Spirit.221 Out of the soul’s intense longing for God, believers dedicate themselves to seeking Spirit, which never ceases to seek the beloved. Nowhere is the metaphor of hide-and-seek more poetically expressed than in the Song of Songs. Representing God and the human soul, each part takes turns longing for and seeking the hidden other. He pleads, “O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the covert of the cliff, let me see your face, let me hear
Seeking God
224 Recognizing the need to strengthen the spiritual senses, Ignatius of Loyola developed spiritual exercises to attune the senses to perceive divine mystery.225 Ignatian spiritual exercises summon one’s ability to see, feel, smell, and sometimes taste what is described in the biblical text as if one were there. This and other practices that invite playing nurture the ability to perceive what is deep within or behind what registers to the ordinary senses.
Ignatius- spiritual practice
239 In playing, he coaxed people into trading hearts of stone for hearts of flesh. When Jesus played, he facilitated experiences of revelation, but when human beings encounter Spirit in the hide-and-seek of revelatory experiencing, we discover in small doses what it must have been like to experience the playing of Jesus. Jesus’
Jesus uses play to change hearts to love
Every day human beings hide—not because they want to, but because they feel the need for self-protection. I hide from what I fear will harm me, and I also hide things from myself because they threaten my sense of self and the world, which I need in order to feel safe. There are some hard truths (memories, emotions, and deeply held beliefs) that I unconsciously keep from myself. This
During medieval church history, practices of religious devotion were intended to engage the whole person—not only the rational mind but also the emotions, the imagination, and the body.245 Especially in the medieval monastic tradition of the West, the whole person was cultivated through a life of worship, work, and study. In the Benedictine community, “[a] novice was initiated into the community through a kind of practical process of imagination, an exercise of both the creative faculty of the mind and the mnemonic capacity of the physical body.”246
Medieval practices - the whole person
Nevertheless, the holistic approach to Christian formation in medieval monasticism created hospitality for practices that fostered revelatory experiencing.
Playing with Devotional Dolls In the fourteenth century, nuns in the Rheinland, Germany, played with dolls as a practice of venerating the infant Jesus. Not only do descriptions of these devotional dolls exist, some of the dolls and their accessories have survived.249 A small trove of these treasures belongs to the Cistercian convent of the Holy Cross in Rostock in northeastern Germany, which owns as many as seven “Poppen” or in modern German “Puppen” or dolls.
For example, Gertrude of Helfta (1256 – ca. 1302) had mystical visions of clasping the newborn Jesus to her own breast in love and devotion.258 At
