Play hard, play fair, have fun
I was just checking out the site of someone I used to be acquainted with on-line. She's a Christian. I stopped following her site because she took it down for a while, and she stopped coming over here right around the time that I started admitting that my faith was crumbling and that I was angry.

Today I checked, out of curiosity, to see if her site is back up. It is. And it had a piece that really made me sad. She was talking about a church she'd seen that had, "Come on over to my house before the game. -- God" on one side, and, "Come on over to my house. Bring the ribs. -- God" on the other.

She was terribly upset. Didn't the people at that church understand that they needed to look at the pleasures of heaven, not the pleasures of the flesh? And then she asked if people really "play" with God that way, and was upset that they might take their relationship with God so lightly.

I don't know about you, but I played with my father when I was a child, and I play with him now. I played with my mother, and we play now. Part of the parent/child relationship is play, even when the child is an adult. (Or at least it should be. It might be any kind of play -- in my family it's verbal play -- but it should be there.)

How sad to see God only as a stern parent, and not one who might be playful. Have you ever read The Color Purple? I like when Shug says that anyone can see that It (god/dess) loves us and wants to be loved back. How can you tell? Because it's always trying to do stuff that pleases us. It invented the color purple, dancing trees, and sex. (And possibly smplmn and I have to say, only a god/dess with a sense of humor could have pulled that one off, although Shug doesn't say so.)

That does not sound like a god/dess who wants their people to be solemn, or to experience only high-flown, "spiritual" pleasures.

One of the things that flipped me out of the church like a water drop in an oily pan was the fact that I was beginning to suspect that the whole denial of the pleasures of the flesh thing was bullshit.

I didn't jump off the other side of the bridge and decide that pure indulgence was the way to go. Even in my state of flaming apostasy, I'm not interested in simply tipping the seesaw to the other side.

But there is one thing I know. If there is no divine (and maybe there isn't,) it's still a good thing to invest in the pleasures of the soul, and there is no requirement to be ascetic about the pleasures of the body. (Ain't a problem if you're drawn to it -- different people balance different ways.) (Don't argue with me about the fact that with no divine there is no soul. Says who?) If there is a divine, if it's a divine with any sense, it wants us to enjoy *all* of the world, not just one straitened part of it.

Funniest part? As usual with Christians who are trying to draw straight lines around their own and other's souls, it isn't even Biblical. David danced before the Lord, Jesus turned water into wine for a wedding, and anyone who wants to tell me that Song of Songs is strictly a poem of spiritual love is extremely naive.

And it's just sad. Mama and Daddy want to play, and Junior thinks he's too grown up.