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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2024
‘We piped to you, and you did not dance.’ And when people do dance, we tend to look down disapprovingly from our upper window, like the worthy lady Michal. She remained barren, and so do we.
It has perhaps become commonplace to say that ours is an age which has forgotten how to play (eutrapelia a forgotten virtue, and all that). There are even therapists to teach us how to play! But somehow, the Church seems to go on, doing all things in moderation and busily turning the Lord’s wine back hto water.
Now the books under consideration—admittedly a rather heady mixture—are all about wine, or attempts at wine.
Richard Neville in Play Power (the book was previously to be called Flower Power) offers us his, in many ways attractive, version of ‘the underground scene’. He admits to being himself only halfliberated, so perhaps he won’t mind another half-liberated person venturing to offer some comments from a slightly different angle. Richard Neville’s background is political, and his interest in play power is as a form of political movement (when I first met him, he confiied rather shamefacedly to still writing letters to the New Stateman). Earnest protest movements suddenly caught fire (turned into wine), and became parties, games; people began to preach revolution, not because it was important, but because it was fun. People began to have confidence just to ‘do their thing’ (which is highly revolutionary in its implications). The whole thing became ‘turned on’.
page 281 note 1 Play Power, by Richard Neville. Jonathan Cape, 1970, 38s.
The Christ, Psychotherapy and Magic, by Duncan, A. D.. George Allen and Unwin, 1969, 42sGoogle Scholar.
The Rose‐Garden Game, by Wilkins, Eithne. Victor Gollancz, 1969, 63sGoogle Scholar.
Catholic Pentecostals, by Kevin, and Ranaghan, Dorothy. Paulist Press, 1969, 17s. 6dGoogle Scholar.
page 284 note 1 Kerr, Fergus O.P., ‘Liberation and Contemplativity’, New Blackfriars, April 1969CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
page 286 note 1 David Rast, in his editorial introduction to the number of Good Work devoted to the Japanese Tea Ceremony, Spring 1969.
page 287 note 1 We must, of course, avoid spiritual ‘technocraticism’—cf. my ‘Thoughts of a Monknik’, New Blackfriars, October 1969. But the pentecostals are all agreed that they have become increasingly aware of the ‘other‐power’ nature of their lives. We must surely get away from the whole dualism of own‐power and other‐power (tariki and jiriki are inseparable, even in Zen—as pointed out, for instance, by Marco Pallis in The Way and the Mountain): it is not (and here I am being a very traditional Dominican), it is not ‘partly God and partly me’. It is wholly God; and wholly me. Our legitimate and necessary fear of sensationalist thaumaturgy and a merely success‐seeking spirituality should not lead us into a timidity which is itself equally Pelagian (and rationalist) in its tendency.
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