In a brilliant recent article, the Anglican theologian Simeon Zahl reminds us that the work of the Holy Spirit remains “unanticipatable” and “unmanipulable.” The Spirit is like tongues of fire, “rivers of living water” (John 7:38) that can never be bottled, and a “violent wind” (Acts 2:1) that “blows where it wills” (John 3:8). “Indeed,” Zahl warns, “the one thing Christians can be sure of is that the Spirit will resist idolatrous attempts to reduce the Spirit’s work to something they can manage, anticipate, and control.” This does not mean that we cannot say anything at all before an unspeakable wildness. Christians can say the Spirit affects the heart (2 Cor. 3:3), transforms us (2 Cor. 3:18), and orchestrates “some sort of subjective encounter with freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17).
But if the Spirit remains outside of our control, what does this deeply transformative “encounter with freedom” even look like? If we attempt to describe life in the Spirit, are we left with either a set of quasi-idolatrous step-by-step diagrams or a blank canvas we were too careful ever to touch?
As he has elsewhere, Zahl worries about the latter possibility — life in the Spirit remaining an “empty set,” only described “negatively” (and blankly) as freedom from the law and fear but not for anything. Yet here, drawing especially on the Pentecostal theologian Nimi Wariboko, Zahl tells us that life in the Spirit is for play — not any specific sport or game, but as an overarching way of being. Play is non-instrumental, like when a student studies for the subject, toying with her ideas or playing in the lab, or as a believer follows the law out of sheer delight, rather than to anxiously change God’s anger to love and work her way to eternal life. In fact, play is marked by a “non-seriousness” that places us in a “relaxed field” and lets us remain receptive to the creativity of the unpredictable Spirit because it isn’t defensive at all. Play also happens to be a lot of fun.
Zahl sees his work as following the Anglican Prayer Book tradition. He spotlights the Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Easter in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: “O Almighty God, who alone canst order the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; Grant unto thy people, that they may love the thing which thou commandest.” Should we, then, picture our wills and affections being reordered to love as our becoming more playful, not taking ourselves quite so seriously, and shifting, as Zahl says, to a “realm of humor, self-depreciation, and spontaneity”?
I think so, if we also recall the specific context in which we might hear that collect — the liturgy. (Zahl has pointed out the “affective dimension of prayer and liturgical practice” as an area for further work.) I think the liturgy deepens Zahl’s work on playfulness by relating it to contemplation even as Zahl’s emphasis on freedom from the law provides a useful corrective to much liturgical theology.
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After all, in his influential The Spirit of the Liturgy, the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini writes of the “playfulness of the liturgy,” which, like Zahl, he contrasts to instrumental activities, even any “artificial system of aim-conscious educational influences” that “grave and earnest people,” impatient with any aimlessness, try to impose. Instead, the liturgy is “purposeless, but full of meaning” — it opens our eyes to creation for what is essentially “a natural manifestation of the living God,” irreducible to even the most complex of our human purposes. The liturgy has neither strategic goals nor learning objectives, because it draws us away from purposes altogether to simply dwell in an “entire spiritual world,” where we “contemplate God’s majesty,” much like children in the “open woods and fields.” Like Zahl, Guardini will speaks of “relaxation,” here as liturgical repose, and “freedom,” as the Spirit transforms us—and not on our timetable—in worship to finally “become free toward our true essence.”
The liturgy does not control the Spirit’s work because the liturgy retains play as a way of being. One of the Scripture passages that Guardini draws on is in Proverbs: “I was with him, forming all things, and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times, playing in the world,” Wisdom says (8:30-31). Another Catholic exponent of playfulness, Hugo Rahner, writes that this playing of Wisdom shows the superabundance of God’s creative freedom that we can only grasp through a “purely negative theology,” including our play, as God, like the first Montessori educator ever, “has made for us children’s toys out of the bright and variegated forms of his world wherewith to educate us.”
After all, as Donald Nicholl writes, because God created out of neither necessity nor need, the only human parallels to the act of creation are contemplation and play, both of which lack any end outside of themselves. Liturgy is playful contemplation. Rahner quotes the Venerable Bede on the liturgy as a divine game, so that, for the onlooker, the sacrament of baptism, in which a person looks the same going into a font as when emerging, “seems no more than a piece of play,” even as it is also a sign for the participant. Liturgy, then, cannot be self-conscious—to be faithful to the Creator, it must remain somewhat strange, indecorous, childlike to observers and even sometimes to us.
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Still, in our divided Church, Zahl’s play may seem different from Guardini’s (and Rahner’s) playfulness. Zahl writes of play as open to future possibilities, even those that are disruptive, and resistant to any mechanism that presages a return to law, and the Catholic writers instead seem to prescribe awareness of an existing cosmic harmony and routine attendance at a Sunday morning Mass at the neighborhood parish. In fact, Zahl has worried about Catholic spirituality reducing the Spirit to a mere facilitator for a process of growth amid a stable and authorized backdrop that leads to anxiety when that growth fails to arrive on schedule (or, worse, must be simulated). Presumably, for their part, the Catholic respondents might worry that Zahl’s Spirit inspires neglect of created reality as it is, instead of a fascination with change in the name of freedom.
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Neither concern is completely warranted. Zahl’s “Protestant” theology, emphasizing the freedom of the Spirit, highlights relatively undeveloped parts of Rahner’s and Guardini’s Catholic works. Rahner recognizes that “only he who is secure in God can be truly light of heart,” and Guardini points out that those who worry about “moral problems in everything” have trouble understanding the liturgy, which “moralizes so little.” The liturgy would seem not to work with the anxiety about moral performance that Zahl worries (and Luther worried) about in Catholic spirituality. Further, Guardini writes of the Catholic affirmation of created reality as it is: “All of this becomes merely human when one separates it from the cross.” He acknowledges the “true danger of the liturgy” is when it turns into “religious culture,” “too familiar,” and lacking any “tension.” In other words, the Catholic writers seem to agree that life in the Spirit can be too assured, too structured.
As for Zahl, he imagines the newness of life in the Spirit as what his teacher David Ford sees as entering into a “drama,” without the clarity and completeness of an “epic,” but still retaining an overall “sense of plot.” There is improvisation, not interruption, of the “biblical pattern” present in “practices of faith,” including regular celebrations of the Eucharist. Regarding created reality, Nimi Wariboko, the Pentecostal theologian on whom Zahl draws, writes that the Spirit intensifies “the particularity of each person” and “enables creation to actualize its God-given gifts.” When Wariboko writes of “the eros toward open future,” it is not desire for the sublimity of endless change but for the deepening beauty of that which is. In other words, Zahl would seem to agree that life in the Spirit — even if the Spirit is fire, water, and wind—can be too spontaneous, ruining the drama, leaving creation completely behind.
How can we imagine liturgy that is both spontaneous and structured? The answer is to return to the theme of playfulness. After the charismatic revival, Richard Baer wrote of perhaps unexpected similarities between speaking in tongues and liturgical worship as they both set aside our analytical side — that part of us focused on purposes — for a more immediate experience of God, whether the Spirit is moving the believer to the childlike release of tongues or into the dance-like flow of the liturgy, where repetition releases us from scrupulous analysis and undue introspection. Their shared playfulness means that glossolalia and liturgy need not be competitive but may even create space for one another.
Another Pentecostal theologian, Frank Macchia, has described a liturgy in which a sung chorus is followed by a pause and then “suddenly, in the midst of the pause came a loud cry in tongues from a woman somewhere in the auditorium.” Afterward, silence once more. Then another congregant interpreted the cries, acting “more like a critic who struggles to interpret a work of art.” Macchia recognizes the tongues show a “dramatic response to God which is ultimately too deep for words,” but they do not mean a rejection of words, as the chorus shaped the silence for the woman to speak in tongues, which then yielded to further silence followed by more words, however tentative the exegesis. As such, for Macchia, glossolalia “grants an equal role to both spontaneous and structured worship,” as both seem ritually necessary. After all, John Milbank has written that beauty without the “risk of a sublime interruption of our expectations” becomes tedium (perhaps, in Guardini’s words, the complacency of “religious culture”), while the sublime only makes sense as discontinuity amid harmony.
How might we imagine life in the Spirit without saying too much or saying too little? In a recent podcast, Simeon Zahl speaks of the experience of the Anglican liturgy as “subtle,” so that “a space that opens up that is not overdetermined.” We might find that we can characterize that space in two seemingly discordant but ultimately complementary ways. Guardini says, “The liturgy has something in itself reminiscent of the stars, of their eternally fixed and even course, of their inflexible order, of their profound silence, and of the infinite space in which they are poised.” When we consider the Holy Spirit, he tells us to contemplate liturgically the stars above us, not our own purposes or emotions. But Zahl reminds us that their “inflexible order” and “infinite space,” always beyond our determinations, must remain receptive to spontaneity. Sometimes, as Zahl has said, what we take to be stars are really meteors.
In any case, life in the Spirit seems like learning to play baseball — you must first stop gripping the bat so hard.
Neil Dhingra, a Roman Catholic, is a doctoral student in education at the University of Maryland.