more affinity between cosmic and comic than the mere similarity of the words, but also
 that angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And if this were true of the angels,
 how much more would it be true of the Lord of the angels? In other words, you could say
 in mythological language that the most serious being in the world would be the devil, inflamed
 with hatred and malice against the cosmos, whereas the most non-serious being would be
 God, because he would be supreme lightness, spirit, levity, and indeed Dante intimates
 this when he describes the song of the angels as the laughter of the universe. You know
 what those angels do? Singing "Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah"? What do you think
 that is? That's nonsense. When I was for a while a minister, I used to tell the students,
 I was a university chaplain, and I used to tell the students that we were going to have
 a celebration of the Holy Communion on Sunday at eleven o'clock. And I mean celebration,
 I said. Don't come here out of a sense of duty. If you do, you're a skeleton at the
 feast, and you better stay in bed, or go for a swim, or something. Because here, in celebrating
 the divine mysteries, we are going to join the angels in making celestial whoopee. But
 you see, our tradition has in its background the idea that God is really rather grim. And
 I, you must, so many of you have picked this up as children. Children are very sensitive
 to what I call the aesthetics of religion. And the aesthetics of religion is very much
 overlooked by religious people. In the WASP culture, we have a positive genius for spiritual
 ugliness. I think of, why do we bind our Bibles in black? Why do clergymen go around in black?
 Why do we have that ghastly kind of sickly yellow stained glass in church buildings,
 especially Protestant ones? There's something about it. And then too, in the pulpit, there's
 a certain kind of funny solemnity that goes with preaching. And children immediately detect
 that there's something phony about it. Why does that man put on a special voice, which
 isn't like the ordinary voice people talk with? I know, of course, it was the result
 of the fact long ago that there were no public address systems, and one had to boom to be
 heard in a large building. But there it is, there is this feeling, this flavor. I would
 almost call it, as they say in Zen Buddhism, you know, a person who has too much Zen, and
 who's what we would call got a kind of religious mania. They say he has Zen stink. And so one
 can have religious stink. And it is this kind of strange solemnity, as if God were always
 taking the attitude of, "This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you."
 And so, because of the influence of these images upon our thinking, and you know, images
 have an extraordinarily powerful influence on us. They are much more powerful than logical
 ideas. You can firmly believe with Paul Tillich that God is simply the ground of being, or
 with St. Thomas Aquinas that he is necessary being, or with F. S. C. Northrop that he is
 the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum. But those images that influenced you in childhood
 remain as it were in the very roots of your thinking, at the bottom of your heart, and
 pull those heart strings very strongly, even though you may have outgrown them intellectually.
 So I am for a serious revision of the image of God. I think that's very, very important.
 And that we exorcise this grim Lord of the universe, who is kind, yes, loving, yes, just,
 but solemn, serious. And so of course, the attitude of the minister is so often to the
 young, "Now boys, quit horsing around. You and I have got to get together for a very
 serious talk." Well now, as I indicated, we use the word
 "game," "play," in different ways. We can use it to mean what is only trivial,
 play as distinguished from work. And in our culture we make a very firm differentiation
 between play and work. If I, you know, I enjoy my work so much that I am accused very often
 of not doing any. You know, you write books and you give lectures and you read and all
 that kind of thing, and that's not really work. It would be if you didn't like it.
 But the assumption is, you see, when I want to get away with something and say, "Well,
 I have some work to do," that means, well, of course, you're excused, you can go, because
 it is important that you work. But if I said, "Well, I have some very important play to
 do," it wouldn't quite go over, you see. But the idea is, you see, that you work, and
 although that's the serious part of life, the objective of it is to get enough money
 so as to be able to play. And nobody really does, because most people I know, they make
 lots of money, but when they get home, they don't really play, they're either too tired
 or they watch television. And that's not really playing. That's a kind of non-participative
 dope addiction. But the other thing is that the reason why we don't play is that we believe
 playing, we can do it just so long as it's good for us. In other words, play is called
 recreation. That is to say, what gets you in a fitter condition to go back to work.
 See, work is the objective. So we excuse play and culture and all that kind of thing, in
 that it relaxes us and makes us stronger so that we can be more productive. But you see,
 if you play in order to do better work, you're not really playing. Because play is the kind
 of activity which does not have an ulterior motive. It is the kind of activity that is
 done for its own sake. And according to St. Thomas Aquinas, this is peculiarly characteristic
 of God. Because he says, quoting the book of Proverbs, where the wisdom of God is personalized
 and speaks and says that her function is always to play in the presence of the Most High.
 Unfortunately the King James, which is a very dignified translation of the Bible, says rejoice,
 but the Hebrew says play. And so he said that this was a divine activity, because whereas
 work is done for something, to serve some purpose, he who is all perfection has no purpose.
 There is nothing he needs. He doesn't need to do any work, and therefore the activity
 of God is supremely playful. So in this way, one might say that the most important thing
 in human life for one's sanity is to be able to be playful, or to be able to do things
 which are sublimely useless. Where you see there is no room in our lives for the useless
 and for the purposeless in the sense.


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