Role-playing game systems increase in
popularity year after year for many reasons, but one of the most attractive
features of such games is the opportunity to advance in levels. Kill this many monsters, solve this many
quests, gain this many experience points, and up a level you go, with greater
strength, more magical powers, and greater resistance to attacks that might
kill you.
I can remember, early in my career as a
gamer, yearning after the elusive upper levels. I'd spend hours each week
running a set of characters through Bard's Tale, thrilling each time the group
gained another level. I was, and remain, willing to invest considerable time in
whatever activities would move my avatar ever closer to epic levels of might
and magic.
Developing
characters in a fantastic world was an integral part of my personal maturation.
When I think back to 4th grade, I can remember an awkward stage sitting on the
floor in my parent's bedroom, phone cord stretched across the room, maps and
rule books laid out around me on the carpet, regaling a friend with the details
of the game. The friend on the other end of the line must have been particularly
patient, because I think I talked for hours, literally, about the process for
developing non-player characters that would populate dungeons. In my halting
fashion, as a child less adept at social interaction than academic performance,
the world of games allowed me to move along, slowly, in emotional intelligence,
framed by the conversations of the games. Gaming was a safer way to be awkward.
A clear measurable path for progress really is
magical. This is true not only in games, but in real life. Skill acquisition of
any kind, though time-consuming and pain-staking, offers a set of unparalleled
rewards. There is a visible and discernible change that makes all the effort
worthwhile. Run this much, get this much faster, lose this much weight.
Practice the piano, learn these scales, play Chopin.
Role-playing games are unique in that leveling
up is unidirectional. There is no backsliding. Take your paladin to the
20th level, and she stays there. Perhaps this is the great satisfaction and joy
of RPGs. We can be challenged while never set back. In this way, games decrease
the risks of failure, and this is what satisfies. By comparison, if I stop
running or practicing piano or speaking German, the skills slowly drift away.
Often, I wish growth in the Christian life
were like gaming. Like a cleric whose access to the holy remains steady and
deepens the higher he rises, channeling the energy of their deity with ever
greater proficiency, I wish some days my own holiness were so clearly
progressive. But it isn't. Most of the time, it is difficult to offer markers
of how, from year to year, I grow in faith at all, and if I'm honest, I can
offer more examples of backsliding than forward movement.
For example, recently I realized I am seldom
in prayer. Since pastors commit themselves to a life of prayer, I have over
the years implemented myriad ways to build prayer into my daily life. I have
meditated. I have prayed the daily offices. I plan prayer runs. I go on
retreat. Even just last year, I was praying regularly, daily, in a variety of
ways.
This summer, it occurred to me that I rarely
pray except professionally, as part of worship, or because council asks me to
open our meeting with prayer. How is it possible, given the regular practices
I've cultivated in my life, that I suddenly find myself, a 40-something
Christian pastor, not praying. How can holiness go in reverse?
At least I am aware of the reversal. That's
progress of a sort. It is as if the only power granted a pastor in real life is
the power to see the world and the self increasingly for what it is, a murky
and complex place through which glimpses of brilliant grace inexplicably shine.
I know and trust that while I have not been praying, my friends and
parishioners have, and Christ has continued to intercede before the Father even
while I've been less than present myself in those prayers Christ lifts.
Although almost all of Christianity assumes
some kind of progress in holiness, this progress is considerably more mixed
than we like. Two steps forward, three steps back. Progress, for Christians, is
growth in one area just sufficient enough to illuminate immaturity in some
other area of the Christian life. Just about the time I congratulate myself for
engaging in a particularly successful evangelism conversation at the coffee
shop, I go home and get impatient with my family.
Some Christian traditions over the centuries,
to be sure, have been more confident in their ability to measure growth in
holiness. But the further proof of the folly of such confidence is the
discernment of the wider Christian communion, who have always seen this
over-confidence in self-aware holiness for what it truly is, a mark of
immaturity and lack of spiritual grace.
As desirous as we are of holiness, and as
desirable as clear growth can be, the truth of holiness in Christian tradition
lies elsewhere. In fact, it rests not in measurable means, like leveling up.
True holiness rests outside of us, in God.
Holiness is a God thing
A man runs up to Jesus and asks, "Good
Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus pauses before
answering to ask a question, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but
God alone" (Mark 10:18). The one man who might get a pass on being called
good is the very one who deflects the title away from himself and back to God.
This is a catechetical moment, one worth our
attention. If Jesus himself deflects goodness back to God, there must be
something in the life of holiness that is focused not on our own holiness, but
on the holiness of God.
John Webster, in one of the few recent booklength treatments of holiness, says as much. "Holiness is a predicate of
the personal being, action and relation of the triune God, of God's concrete
execution of [God's] simplicity; it is not a quality in abstraction, but an
indicator of God's 'name'" (Webster 39). Jesus does not want "good" added to
his name, because God alone is good, by nature of the name of God itself.
Theologically, everything related to holiness
is grounded in the holiness of God. God is holiness and gives holiness. Holiness
is established in the hearing of the promises and good news of the holiness of
God. The end or purpose of holiness, if we are to pick up on a solid reformed
insight, is the sanctifying of the holy name of God. Holiness is about God's
own leveling up, as it were.
But in good classic Christian theology, there
is never a God in Godself, God for Godself. The holiness of God is known in
God's being for us. In fact, God is not God without being "for us."
It is another name of God. So the holy God is holy precisely in being for the
people God is actively making holy.
Gamers might think of a parallel concept in
the gaming world, of power-leveling, where a lower level character advances
more quickly through the assistance of a higher level character, who completes
quests or defeats creatures impossible for lower level characters, but allows
the lower leveler to vicariously receive experience points beyond their normal
ability.
A few years ago, when I was studying World of
Warcraft for a book I was writing on media and faith, a friend and long-time
WoW gamer volunteered to walk me through parts of the WoW universe I would not
have survived on my own as a low-level character. I partnered with him on a
quest that included defeating a dragon. My ranger increased a couple of levels
in that short time. As a result, I was then able to travel on my own to a great
number of regions. By vicarously gaming with a friend, I gained strength,
confidence, and freedom. My friend literally increased my capacity for life in
the game.
The analogy works, but not well, because the
holiness of the Christian community that participates in the holiness of God
truly participates, in that the community receives the name of God itself in
its holiness. In Christian theology, we do not become "like" God. We
are gathered up into God's very self. That is holiness. The comparison, if
there is one to gaming, would be that I would no longer just be a gamer in the
game, but would become part of the game-design team. Leveling up, I would have
the chance to write the very game I was playing, co-creator in the diving
gaming.
So is there growth?
All of this leaves us, on the practical
level, wondering whether there is growth in holiness, and if there is, what it
looks like. Clearly, if the holiness of God draws near to us because of who God
is, we need to be able to speak of growth in the holiness that God gives.
For example, John Webster asserts, "We
need to understand that theological thinking about holiness is itself an exercise of holiness" (8). For Webster, a primary aspect of holiness is
"an increase in concentration:
the focusing of the mind, will and affections on the holy God and his ways with
us" (105). We can be at least somewhat confident that growth in holiness
looks like growth in awareness of the holiness of God.
One aspect of God's holiness is its
illumination of our sin. So another mark of holiness in our lives is our
awareness of how far we are from holiness, how far we are from God. God's
holiness, and our awareness of it, shines light on our distance from it. God is
God, and we are not.
I have this suspicion that this related in some ways to Tolkien's concept of sub-creation. Although we cannot live up to the holiness of God, we have had extended to us a role within the creation and sub-creators of God's good creation.
That being said, we immediately circle back
around to the truth that the very God who we are not is the God who is for us
and with us and will not without us. This is why theologians have, over time,
developed in various ways a notion that our growth in grace, if it is to be
described at all, may best be described as a holiness that happens again and
again, once for all, and more and more.
Again and again, because we continually fall
away from it, slide back into ways of life quite distant from the holy life,
and so must, day after day, return to the holiness so graciously extended. This
is the wisdom of Martin Luther in the small catechism, who teaches about
baptism that we
are to daily drown and die to sin and daily rise as a new person in God in
Christ.
Once for all,
inasmuch as Christians frequently emphasize the unique place of Christ's death
and resurrection in the economy of salvation, Christ's taking on the sin of the
whole world in order that we might be made into the holy people of God.
More and more,
and here is the most difficult move, because we truly have seen living examples
of faithful folks who have grown so deeply into the grace of God and rested in
it, that the very holiness of God imbued their lives with particular holiness
and grace. We call these holy ones saints, and for good reason. By the grace of
God, and in mysterious ways, they really did level up. The path was unique and
perhaps unrepeatable, but this in no way detracts from their attractiveness as
examples of holiness.
The Geography of Holiness
 |
| St. Symeon the Stylite |
There is one last thing. Holiness is about
God, God's goodness, God's grace, God's love, God's care. Our own holiness we
tend to consider in terms of behavior or demeanor. Yet there is an unremarked
geography of holiness worth our attention. Holiness is, more than we realize,
an aspect of where we are. Holiness is embodied. Consider the Stylites, whose
holiness was directly correlated to the strangeness of their retreat. Or the
anchorites, whose particular practice of holiness tethered them to holy
structures. Even God's holiness has an unavoidable spatial dimension. The more God is holy, the more God is up.
Perhaps in our quest for progress in holiness, we have failed to notice that
holiness is a place. Holiness is a space, a set-apartness, proximity to
divinity. It's just that in the quantum era, we don't know where we are
anymore, or what "where" is.
Intriguingly, we are living in the
renaissance of table-top gaming, which means game parlors are proliferating and
even chain stores like Barnes & Noble are filling up with card board
creations. All over, little game stores are popping up, typically shelved with
a hodge-podge of gamer paraphernalia, and the ubiquitous stacks of three-ring
binders filled with the king of Collectible Card Games, Magic: The Gathering. But essential to all game stores are the
tables, cheap folding tables and chairs, sometimes sturdier wood structures
readied for war games. Gamers seem not to demand fancy spaces. They'll camp out
in any old place. But they do need to be together, and they do need each other.
It takes players to play a game. The sacred space evoked in gaming has very
little to do with vaulted ceilings or fancy frames, but instead is facilitated
in the holy hospitality of shared imagination. Like any playroom, the mess is
acceptable if it facilitates jouissance.
So let me offer a proposal, one that may not
satisfy all, and certainly will confuse cartographers. The place of holiness is
the neighbor, in particular the neighbors in neighborhood at play. Making
holiness about a place, and the place being the neighbor, might give us some
additional resources for reconsidering all our conversations about growth.
Unlike avatars in RPGs, who approach almost all non-player characters they
encounter simply as utilitarian resources to be benignly exploited for their
own leveling up, our own leveling up is accomplished expressly and completely
in the freedom we receive from the holy God to be holy, and wholly, in our
neighbor.
As an adult gamer, I have begun to play
around, on the side, with indie and meta-games. Traditional roleplaying games
like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinders are spectacular in that they have a
predictable structure in which the imagination can run wild. A game master
leads a group of players through a session they have designed. The session
focuses exploration in a pre-planned scenario, often with a map of the city or
dungeon to be explored, puzzles to solve and monsters to defeat. Some
game-developers, inspired by the traditional role-playing games invented and
popularized by Gary Gygax have imagined alternative gaming systems, less
linear, less spatial. In the end, these are all like varying monastic orders,
sets of rules to cultivate sacred community.
For a time, especially at the stage of
initiation, or during the novitiate, growth in holiness takes the form of
attending to the rules. Most gamers go through a long apprenticeship, time
spent gaming in order to learn the rules of the game. Even long-time gamers
periodically exit the play itself to discuss the finer points of the rules,
even to debate them. But all the rules, all the structure, is assembled in
order to facilitate the game itself. The rules invite a community of players to
forget themselves and lose themselves in the game. The game rolls them up into
something higher, something greater, something divine.
There were a lot of great essays published in 2015. In the Twitter era, accused as it is of attention-deficit reading, long-form journalism has held its own. We still write and read sentences longer than 140 characters and blogs longer than 800 words.
