Exercises for the Left Hand
Why Godly Play?It's to steal past the dragons!
C. S. Lewis was often asked why he, an Oxford scholar and lay theologian, wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. Once, he responded by writing:
"I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past certain inhibitions which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood.
Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ?
I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices, almost as if it were something medical.
But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday School associations, One could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?
Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could."
©CS Lewis Company and Harper Collins Publishers
C.S. Lewis, of course, was right and he has shown us so. We also believe a direct encounter with the sacred stories, parables, liturgical actions and silence of the Christian Tradition, as presented by Godly Play, can also steal past "those watchful dragons".
Catch only what you've thrown your self, all is mere skill and little gain; But when you're suddenly the catcher of a ball thrown by an eternal partner With an accurate and measured swing towards you, to your centre, in an arch from the great bridge building of God.
"why catching then becomes a power, not yours, a world's." - Rainer Maria Rilke
Quoted in Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer ( NY:Continuum,1975)
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