- In his classic book Homo Ludens, the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga (1955) summed up his elaborate definition of play as follows: "Play is a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious,’ but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner."
- In his influential essay, The Role of Play in Development, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1978) characterized children’s play as activity that is (a) “desired” by the child, (b) “always involves an imaginary situation,” and (c) “always involves rules” (which are in the minds of the players and may or may not be laid down in advance).
- In an often-referred-to article on play in the Handbook of Child Psychology, Kenneth Rubin and his colleagues (1983) characterized play as behavior that is (a) intrinsically motivated; (b) focused on means rather than ends; (c) distinct from exploratory behavior; (d) nonliteral (involves pretense), (e) free from externally imposed rules; and (f) actively (not just passively) engaged in by the players.
So I put it to you that worship, or church, is play.
The only places I'm struggling with it is Huizinga's inclusion of 'not serious' which I think would chafe some worshippers, and Vygotsky and Rubin's inclusion of imagination and pretense, but I think those are very inherent in, in particular, the Eucharist.
But if you google the purpose or the benefits of play, the case breaks down. So has religion stolen play from us?
Do we need to ensure that our worship meets the needs of play for adults?
