Out of the Ashes Reflection: Play Kubb
About a month ago as I was listening to Anthony Esolen speaking about his book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. In the podcast, he liked our culture to a bombed out city. Every day I pass by these two structures which are in the process of being demolished. One, a massive industrial center and the other, a mental hospital. How are our economics and mental health doing these days anyways?
Esolen is not merely making an analogy, this is a visible reality. Isn't it possible that our brick and mortar is an indication of our health?
A father once told me he enjoys his evenings because he is in the basement, his son is upstairs, and his wife is on the main floor. What are they doing? Being intimate with screens. I do not mean that in a perverse way, but in an factual way. We are choosing things over people. Fewer and fewer families no longer know how, or even want to be present to their families. Esolen's whole book is an example of how we have abdicated everything: education, recreation, counseling, faith formation, sex, etc. I know this to be true, too. I recently received a phone call last week from a mother asking me to teach her daughter how to do an oil change. Where is the father I wondered? He's M.I.A, apparently.
Over the Fourth of July holiday I recalled what Robert Lee penned in 1964 when said in his book, Religion and Leisure, "Our holidays, once holy days, are synonymous for a day off work where we do the same thing for each holiday. This leveling of the holidays has amounted to an erosion of ideas and principles; the Fourth of July is no different than Labor Day in terms of what we actually do (Lee, 1964, p.127)... "We have become so used to sitting and waiting for the good things in life to be discovered, manufactured, and shipped to our neighborhood store for us to purchase that we expect purpose and goals to come that way too. We have come to think of freedom as choosing or not to buy what is advertised, and the free person as the one who is in no way biased by commitment or decision” (p.251). How true! What would Lee say today?
Esolen's eighth chapeter is entitled: "Playing Upon the Waters; Brining Play Back to Life." It's chapter's title is a nod to Proverbs 8:30 and speaks to reclaiming our need to feed our imagination and become human again through play. He relies on Homer's paintings (Boys in a Pasture, A Basket of Clams, Snap the Whip, Watermelon ) to paint a picture of comparing the leisure of today compared to then. How foreign the paintings must seem to most people today.
I recently came across a game called "Kubb", aka Viking Chess. It's a lawn game where you try to knock down your opponents five blocks of wood and eventually the king. My kids love it. I recommend you make a set, (I regret spending $40 when I could have easily made it). These are the types of things that are going to restore our culture not following Fiona the hippo on Facebook.
