The "Form" of Love's Play

G.K. Chesterton said:

Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.i

This reveals another dimension of play, paradoxical and yet liberating. True playfulness reaches maturity in a human heart only with the simultaneous blossoming of love, the love that conquers fear. This is why the licentious freedoms of modernity do not unseal authentic liberty and the joy born of it, but rather lead to sadness and disillusionment, to the burden of compromise, to the confusion of wondering why all of my best efforts keep running up against limits and frustrations. On the other hand, a generous heart that lovingly embraces the burdens of responsibility, of the law of God and the call to care for others, as well as the deepest and most authentic inclinations of one’s own humanity fashioned by God, sets out upon the path to true freedom and wonder. But the inverse is also true: a heart that is open to wonder-filled awe before reality, and the play that is born within it, alone can truly embrace and live the drama and responsibility of life authentically, as the true story that it is being written by the hand and heart of a loving, playful God.

In both cases we touch the paradoxical fullness of the one and only path to freedom, namely, truth; and truth is not merely an ideal to be pursuit or a spiritual goal but something inscribed in the very fabric of the universe, and of the human body itself. It is the primal playfulness that permeates the cosmos. And when the Scriptures and the Church speak to us of the nature of authentic play, setting limits on the unrestricted use of our freedom which would harm us rather than help us, enslave us rather than liberate us, they are in fact not imposing anything beyond what is already given in God’s creative intentions from the beginning, setting our feet on the broad path of liberty and wholeness, preventing us from countless pitfalls which we perhaps cannot see. As Chesterton says elsewhere:

[The Catholic Church’s] experience naturally covers nearly all experiences; and especially nearly all errors. The result is a map in which all the blind alleys and bad roads are clearly marked, all the ways that have been shown to be worthless by the best of all evidence: the evidence of those who have gone down them. On this map of the mind the errors are marked as exceptions. The greater part of it consists of playgrounds and happy hunting-fields, where the mind may have as much liberty as it likes; not to mention any number of intellectual battle-fields in which the battle is indefinitely open and undecided. But it does definitely take the responsibility of marking certain roads as leading nowhere or leading to destruction, to a blank wall, or a sheer precipice. … Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and coloured dresses and art in the open-air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.ii

We thus see a paradoxical “coming-together” of precisely the dimensions of life that we have been seeking to traverse between and thread together in these fragments: the constraints that set love free and the freedom of love that gives meaning to restraint even while keeping its eyes on the joyous freedom of God. They really are brother and sister, or even better, they really are like lungs and the ribs that protect them, or like the human body and its epidermis, or a womb that encloses the child and both protects and nourishes it. Love always has form because love is always specific, enacted, incarnate. And the restraints that give form to love are part of love’s blossoming; they do not thereby constrict the heart in such a way that it loses either its sensitivity to uniqueness, its spontaneity, or its capacity for mature judgment of specific situations. And this is true not only because such rules set an “outer limit,” a wall to shield from a precipice, but also because they reveal a trajectory. When truly understood, they not only show pitfalls but also unveil values, being a pedagogy in freedom and the true nature of play. This is how the Psalmist is able to say: “In the way of your testimonies I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts, and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word” (Ps 119:14-16).

May we rediscover anew today that the word of God truly gives joy to the heart, acting as both a balm and as light, giving understanding to the eyes of the soul and stirring that wonder—every in hoary-haired old men—that is native only to small children. The law is not opposed to the spirit, for any spirit that is truly alive—any spirit truly in accord with the Spirit—spontaneously embraces the law, the word, and in fact cherishes it as sweet nourishment and delightful fare. And yet the inverse is also true, and in fact even more fundamentally so: that only the spirit of love, of gratuity and play and wonder, can discern the authentic meaning of the “form” of love, and embrace it freely and fully in the manner and the disposition that God desires, which is that of play. In this way alone can the heart mature into that liberty that springs forth from the very center of the heart, from its inner wellspring where the Trinity dwells, and thus receive also every word and call of God with freedom, spontaneity, and the spirit of lightness and confidence, for it corresponds with the deep voice of the Spirit that already springs up within the human heart. When we mature deeply into the love that fulfills the law even while surpassing it, we realize that love and truth are one and the same. We realize that the word of longing in our heart for freedom and the word of truth that approaches us from the outside are one and inseparable, in the same manner that the eternal Word of the Father is inseparable from the Spirit in whom he is begotten, and whom he breathes forth into our world, that Spirit who draws us all to him, to the Word, in whom we become one with the Father.

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i. G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 4. ed. George Martin et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 167.
ii. First part from: “Why I Am A Catholic.” https://www.chesterton.org/why-i-am-a-catholic/
Second from: G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1959), 145. Available here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130