They have been without a pastor for too long, though. Somebody thought it was a good idea to cut out the communal speaking of the creed so that the Stewardship chair could talk about financial commitment to the church. Something about that rankled me. I’m not saying there’s anything particularly magical or life-changing about the words of The Apostles’ Creed or any of the other Christian creedal statements – but I think there IS something liturgically important about the congregation standing up and saying a creed together. Not in the sense of literal adherence to the words, but in the communal sense of reminding ourselves – and one another – of the things that bind us and guide us, even in the midst of wrangling with how to live them out. I like to think that in the subtlest of ways, speaking the things we believe in a ritualistic manner, as a community, helps anchor those things in our minds. In a more ideal world, the communal repetition of creeds would help us take those beliefs out into our daily lives and provide us with a confident place to stand when we get tossed into the midst of those unexpected events – both little and large – that we encounter in our daily lives. Of course, in the world I experience, creeds are more often used as a means of categorization, separation, and dogmatic litmus-testing. Such is life.

Anyhow, for the sermon Leah chose to go off-Lectionary and shared the story from Ezekiel 37 of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. There are SO many things about that passage that grab me. It is a powerful metaphor for revitalization. A miraculous story of death being made life, one step at a time, each level of the miracle happening in succession until what was a pile of bones has become a living, breathing person again.

It also could make for a really interesting situation/premise for a fantasy roleplaying session. Think about it. What would you have your character do if you were wandering in the midst of vast piles of skeletal remains and suddenly they all started re-forming and re-fleshing into human bodies, then a mighty wind came through and restored their breath? A Miracle is happening before your eyes – but lacking any overt and specific explanation from On High, would you be scared shitless and/or freaked out? What would you do?

This is why I SO love having one foot in the faith realm and one in the geek roleplayer realm. Both are concerned deeply with story and metaphor, but both by nature tend to differ in how the characters involved -and we as an audience – encounter the incidents in the story.

When we sing and read and hear our faith stories, we tend to go along with them, secure in the knowledge that since they are faith stories, everything will work out to teach us something or give us wisdom. So we skim the surface of the story’s emotional details and give our assent to the end result – the lesson learned – without spending much time thinking how we might have chosen differently if we were in the role of the protagonists. We’re aware that we’re sharing a faith story, so we safely assume that the hand of the Most High (or whatever it is we have faith in)  is at work within it to make it work out as it should and bring us wisdom or comfort. So what if it’s a story about a guy wandering through piles and piles of human bones – OF COURSE Ezekiel is going to stand in wonder and awe and wait around trusting that the terrible event he’s witnessing is the power of Creation meticulously turning entropy on its ear, bringing life out of death. It’s not like he’s a guy in a zombie movie or anything.

But in a roleplaying game, with its tendency toward conflict, mistrust of the unknown, and impulsive reactions to unexpected changes in the environment, we tend to assume something really bad is going down when piles of bones start coming together apparently on their own initiative to form into skeletons, and then muscles and sinews and flesh start reforming on those skeletons. Some evil necromancy is obviously at work! Our characters are in mortal danger, for surely once these abominations have re-formed, they will attack us. Even if we know that the people these bones used to be were our allies, we feel in our guts that something is happening here that is dangerous and vile – and it must either be violently put down or run from with extreme haste. This could not possibly be a good thing happening, because it is terrifyingly unnatural! Kill it or run from it. Fight or flight.

The thing I wonder is, which of those two reactions tends to be closer to our real-life responses? For me, I think I’m almost always going to go with the fearful fight-or-flight impulse, even faced with a much less overt and frightening encounter than Ezekiel’s. My suspicion is that most of us probably tend toward a similar response. It’s a dangerous world, and we live in a culture of fear that stokes our impulses even further. To allow ourselves to stand in the midst of the strange and unexpected and let it teach us our lessons is rather an anathema.

I wonder how many times we let fear, misunderstanding, or ignorance guide us to impulsively attempt to destroy a miracle in the making before it can finish forming?

And I wonder how much of that impulse could be soothed if we worked harder to ingrain the creeds of our faith (be that faith in God, or faith in science, or faith in ourselves) into our temperaments – not as literal dogmatic assertions that solidify our fears, but as anchor points to mitigate our fears so that we can stick around long enough to recognize something awesome in the making?