Divine Play

The work of God is both serious and merry; so it is intended we should be. God's kenotic acts are entirely gratuitous: there is no need for God to create; there is no need for God to redeem. It is for sheer love that God does both; and for no purpose. God is at play.

Thus it is too with the way of tears: the holding of two things in the heart is both knowledge of the human tragedy and our insecure, perilous freedom, and at the same time the lightness, delightedness of life lived in the security of the redeeming, playful love of God....

If we are to mirror this God, if we are to fulfill our vocation as co-creators, if Christ is to indwell and his kenotic love pour through us, then we must live out of the knowledge of this silence and this laughter even as we live and relate to one another. We must be intent in the silence, and ready to glimpse the incongruent reality that makes us laugh. We must be ready to see not only the beauty and glory of what God's gifts to us enable us to create, but also the absurdity, the ridiculousness, of taking our selves too seriously in the light of the divine perspective, or despairing when our hearts are in hell.

[The Fountain and the Furnace, p. 291...292]