This is Faith in Play #82: Nice, for September 2024.
“I need to be more human.”
Not knowing how to reply to this comment, I silently awaited some statement that would give it context. In a moment I was rewarded.
“I need to be more nice.”
I recognized something of a non-sequitur, so I said by way perhaps of comfort, “I think most humans aren’t very nice.”
“Well, they should be.”
I knew that this person was struggling with a difficult relationship with someone brought into the family by marriage (and that’s probably already more than I should say), and I had no real advice. However, I certainly agreed that humans should be nice–yet by and large we aren’t. The Fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22f does not include “niceness”, but it does include love, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control, and somewhere in there something like “niceness” emerges. People should be nice; certainly Christians should be. Yet we aren’t, and we struggle to be.
The fact that it is the Fruit of the Spirit (and I’ve written elsewhere About the Fruit) suggests to me that it is not possible for us to have those qualities in ourselves. They are expressions of the Spirit of God within us, forming us into new creatures who express the character of Jesus in the world. That brings me back to a point I’ve made repeatedly, that this is a character quality which ought to be exhibited in our relationships with each other at the gaming table. Those of us who are believers should quite naturally be nice to everyone present.
Yet I am not so sure about our characters. Should they be nice?
Some will disapprove of playing characters who are mean-spirited, nasty, cruel. C. S. Lewis somewhere commented that in writing The Screwtape Letters it was easier to get into the mindset of the senior devil theoretically authoring them than to get back out of it again, and I think there is some of that, that if you play a character who is unkind to those around him it is easy to fall into that pattern when the game is over.
On the other hand, there is something unrealistic about playing most characters as nice. A character can be good and likable but not nice–Han Solo springs to mind. Besides, if a consistent niceness is a quality only God can produce in people, and many of those in whom He is working do not consistently display this, most characters are not going to be nice, in that sense. Some will be caustic wits, some short-tempered, some gossipy–there will be flaws in their character, little ways in which they are not nice.
We can, and perhaps should, play those traits; but in our own relationships, we should be nice.
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