Letting a Bird Take Flight: Learning Play

"God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness, but man is made God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly and play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present." (Plato, Laws)

The above is quoted in Robert Bellah's book Religion in Human Evolution. Bellah has made a name for himself as a sociologist of American religion -- a "man of the Left" who saw religion as central feature of the collective life of human beings. Bellah's now famous contention is that a constitutive feature of religion is that of play -- a human capacity that, the argument goes, evolved in human beings, just like noses and ears and eyes.

Play, for Bellah, is essential to religion because it is a symbolic practice -- stepping away from one narration of reality and into another -- maybe grander -- narrative. It is an imaginative practice where we make new stories out of the material stuff of the world. Think of the young person who, upon picking up just the right sized stick, is transformed into a jedi knight weilding a lightsaber. Play is the uninstrumentalized end of our imagining. It is where we suspend some of the ideas we have about the world so that others may emerge. Bellah would say that, in a sense, religion and ritual do this same sort of work.

I've been thinking about play since our church's film group, Reel Spirituality, watched Greta Gerwig's fabulous movie Lady Bird (2017). Christine "Lady Bird" McPherson, played by the fabulous Saoirse Ronan, is young girl attending high school. You get the sense that she has had to learn to grow up too quickly: in the film you learn that her father struggles with depression, her mother is a survivor of abuse, the family struggles to meet its material and emotional needs, and she attends a strict Catholic all-female school. The threads of life easily get rubbed bare.

A lot of "coming of age" films are about the struggle to find one true self, but Lady Bird seems caught up in something more interesting: life, not just as a quest to find some core identity, but about the persistence of our need for playfulness in a world rubbed bare by harm.

In many ways, the film shows how playfulness goes wrong -- how it becomes bound up with our (very human) tendency toward comparison, competition, and self-absorption. Lady Bird fantasizes that she lives in a large home in the wealthy part of town, only to come back and lash out at her parents for not having enough. Without her mother's cooperation, she insists on being called Lady Bird, not Christine. She alienates herself from relationships with her best friend, Julie, so that she might pursue romantic interests with the resident "bad boy" named Kyle, played by Timothée Chalamet. Maybe the best scene in the movie comes when Lady Bird's mother, Marion, silently -- and blankly -- washes dishes after she finds out her daughter has lied to her about applying to college in New York. In desperation, Lady Bird yells at her mother to talk to her: "I'm sorry. I know I'm bad...I'm sorry I wanted more." Sheesh.

Playfulness goes wrong when it leads us to divest from the life we have been given: when it leads those closest to us to feel like they aren't enough. Divesting is as easy as changing a name.

But at it's best, maybe playfulness can lead us to re-invest in this life. It can tutor us in the courage necessary to take the right risks. Maybe this is why children love fantasy books: they teach us that we can conquer dragons. One of the main dilemmas that pushes forward the plot orbits around the question, not just whether Lady Bird will get to attend college in New York City, but what it will mean for her family is she does. After all, in the middle-class imagination college is a right of passage. College is where some start that adolescent hero's journey. They try on new hats. Find new friends and create new identities. For those so privileged, college is about imagining who we might become.

So, spoiler alert: Lady Bird moves across the country and starts her new life. She finds herself in the usual dives of most college freshman. But she softens: Lady Bird introduces herself by her given name, Christine. She finds herself in a church, which earlier in the film only stood as a symbol for repression, but now leaves her in tear. She calls her mother, who at this point is still giving her the silent treatment, and she offers her an apology.

She reflects on the drive through Sacramento, this time with gratitude: "All those bends I’ve known my whole life and stores and the whole thing … I wanted to tell you. I love you. Thank you."

The movie wraps without us knowing what happens to the relationship of this mother and daughter, emphasizing the harm done and resisting any easy cotton-candy forgiveness. Yet, even as the movie ends on the steps of a Presbyterian church in New York City, there is an odd feeling of homecoming. We will embark on all kinds of playful adventures, we will led into exile, yet there is hope for return. It's the return that makes play possible. That'll preach, friends: in the end, we will return to the place we first knew, held in the arms of the love that first began us.