"God answers my prayers everywhere except on the golf-course."
Play Matters
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Play Matters (So play as if it matters), Susan Saint Sing, Pheonix, Vesuvius Press, 2012 ISBN 978-1-61956-086-4
The book consists of 5 main chapters (plus prologue and epilogue:
The energy of play;
The collective kinetic blueprint;
Breakthrough kinesis;
Agon and the hero athlete;
Ectasy and the hero athlete.
Sing quotes Scott Kretchmar’s definition of play “A state of fundamental pre-rational spontaneity which is freely chosen and entered into for the simple sake of wanting to do so. It is of a nature outside of the reality of the present, yet is equally as real to the players as the present is to the observer.”
She sees play as part of all cultures, part of the fabric of God’s creative energy adding that “to deny the energy of play is to deny and impede the very energy of our existence”.
She sees great sporting moments as creative play like when Dick Fosbury did his first flop gold “and turned the world of high-jumping literally upside down”. She quotes Michael Novak on quarterbacks make tens of thousands of passes every year but when “a player or a team executes a play so perfectly—it is as though they cease for a moment to be pedestrian and leap into a realm of the Gods”.
She argues that if play is from God then it must have been there from the beginning. In Scripture she finds examples of: “God playing with creation; God forming things to play; God describing this energy of play as dancing”.
Starting from the story of Hero in Greek mythology, the author, who herself suffered a gymnastic accident in which she broke her back and neck, reflects on pain and why athletes expect and embrace pain. She identifies three types of pain: “voluntary, such as in training; involuntary, such as in injury; and cognitive, both voluntary and involuntary, such as in coaching when a coach consciously plans and judges the pain allotted in the discipline of that training for another, or involuntarily sets goals that incidentally involves pain”.
Ecstasy and joy, she believes are normally achieved by going through pain.
She compares the pain athletes endure to the ’the Dark Night of the Soul.” Or even the Garden of Gethsemane in their quest of hope and faith that “the unattainable goal is attainable”.
The book includes a quotation from Joseph Ratzinger, later to become, Pope Benedict XVI
which I have never seen before – but will no doubt quote in future! – “that is what play means: action, that is truly free – without a goal and without a need to do it – while harnessing and fulfilling all of one’s personal forces. In this sense, sport becomes a sort of foretaste of Paradise: a stepping out of the slavish earnestness of our daily life and its concerns into the free seriousness of something that should not be serious and is therefore beautiful. In that way sport overcomes daily life. But it has another character, especially with children: It is training for life. It symbolizes life itself carried forward in freeform manner.”
The main section of the books ends with a passionate cry from the author: “Play is intended to help us transcend our base nature and advance us as part of the energy of the expanding universe. Maybe that’s why the Creator blessed us with it. Play matters, so play as if it matters…”