Are there spiritual benefits to playfulness?

Citing activities such as adult coloring books and playgrounds for grown-ups, researchers and media reports suggest that adults who play reap benefits in mental, physical and spiritual health.

The coloring trend is “a sign of Americans’ growing interest in mindfulness and spirituality,” reads an article published by the Harvard Divinity School, and the AARP says participation at adult-friendly playgrounds “checks off several of the boxes that we know are good for the brain.”

Yet “Playfulness is an understudied personality trait,” wrote Dr. René Proyer in an article published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences earlier this year. The psychologist said the benefits of adult play can vary culturally and by individual.

In an interview with the Dalai Lama, CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta focused on the spiritual leader’s tendency toward good humor and his belief that play is essential.

“Basically, we are [a] social animal,” the Dalai Lama explained. To be playful, he said, is to “act like a human being.”

Q. Do you believe there are spiritual benefits to playfulness? What forms of play enrich your life, spiritually or otherwise?

Being at the end of several weeks of vacation travel, what can I say but “Yes!” to the benefits and importance of pure recreation for humans. Fun activities are spiritually enriching, and mentally and physically nourishing.

Johan Huizinga, author of “Homo Ludens,” a pioneering 1939 study on the centrality of play in human culture and society, said that “ludens,” meaning playing in Latin, is as important as “sapiens,” meaning wise, in defining human beings. His argument was that all animals think but only man plays. (I would also mention evidence that challenges both the notions that play is exclusively human and that humans display more wisdom than the so-called lower animals.)

Adult coloring books have no appeal to me, but I can lose myself for hours in a large and challenging jigsaw puzzle. I believe the attraction is similar: the focus on color and shape, without words or numbers.

I am not sure though that mindfulness is the correct term. To me it is refreshing to turn down the articulate brain and take a break from thinking. I enjoy lap swimming for exercise, and probably no activity involves less intellect. Yet in these semi-trance states many a good idea and problem solution has come to me.

Maybe this ability of our minds to work productively while we think we are at play is what makes us uniquely human.

Roberta Medford

Atheist

Montrose

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Play is indeed one important element of the human experience. Because the human experience is spiritual, play is spiritual. Children naturally engage in play activities, both alone and with each other. Adults play as well. We play with our kids. We play games with each other. We play sports and often spend great amounts of time and money watching other adults play professionally. We play for fun, we play for money, we play for bragging rights.

The benefits of such recreation are immense. God wants us to regularly rest and enjoy life, and playing certainly helps relieve us of the constant “grind” of work. God wants us to relate positively with others, and play is often the vehicle for social interaction. God wants us to focus on more than just the visible and tangible, and play even helps lift our minds off of the merely pragmatic.

Addressing this question reminds me that my work/play ratio is way off lately. It’s been way too long since I’ve played board games with my family.

Pastor Jon Barta

Burbank

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One of my favorite defining jokes of Unitarian Universalism is that UUs believe in life before death. Adulthood isn’t a gradual but a relentless destruction of childhood, and laughter and play are necessary parts of life.

While the Bible tells us that Jesus wept (that is, in fact, the Bible’s shortest sentence), it never says that Jesus laughed. Ecclesiastes says that there’s a time to dance, a time to sing, a time to laugh, and a time to cry but, save for the suggestion in Psalms that God laughs at those earthly kings who would dare to align themselves against him, there’s not a lot of laughter or play in the Bible. Unless you count Sodom and Gomorrah, and you know where laughter and play got them.

I agree with Ecclesiastes that there is a time for all of those things. It’s a reasonable Protestant code. I also believe that when we play, we relax, and in relaxing we give ourselves permission to ponder the things that make us happy to be alive.

In the late Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,” the dour monk Jorge tells the slightly-more-jovial Franciscan William of Baskerville that the world is supposed to be a somber place. “Laughter kills fear and without fear there can’t be any faith,” Jorge says. “Because without fear of the devil there is no more need of God.”

I get a lot out of games and activities with friends and family, whether they’re kayaking, playing music, card games, or cooking. It reminds me — though I don’t need to be reminded — that there’s a reason there are 7 billion of us. The version of God I’d like to believe exists is the one that built in a sense of fun to complement the suite of troubles that being alive throws our way.

Marty Barrett

Vice President

Unitarian Universalist Community of the Verdugo Hills (UUVerdugo)