This is Faith in Play #81: The Bland Mind, for August 2024.
I’m going to confess up front that this thought came from a typo: I was studying in the Synoptics about Jesus healing a blind man, and I mistyped bland for blind. I corrected it immediately, but it left me wondering, couldn’t Jesus heal the bland mind?
I asked for input on this, and one of the members of the Christian Gamers Guild suggested that the bland mind was a curse. That’s an interesting and perhaps valuable perspective. After all, as we observed long ago in Faith and Gaming: Settings, the ability to imagine and create through words may well be the very image of God in us. Yet the world often conspires to drive it out of us, telling us that to survive in society we have to conform, become normal, give up imaginings and focus on reality as it is.
Oddly, I know few people who have accepted that. Going from music to role playing games to writing fiction, I have long lived in a world of creativity, and interacted with other creatives, musicians, artists, authors, game designers. Yet I know they’re out there, and from time to time I encounter them. At the same time, even those who fail to create often embrace the wildest creations of others–conspiracy theories, fiction as truth (have you met anyone who believes in The Force, or that there are real vampires roaming the nights?). Those of us who can’t create hunger for the creations of others.
I’m sure Jesus can heal the bland mind; but there is an aspect of that where I hesitate. Jesus can heal cancer, and heart disease, and diabetes, and all of the killer diseases of our time–but in the main He doesn’t. People pray for such healings, but most people who recover do so in the care of physicians.
I don’t know that physicians can cure the bland mind–but I think we can. Our interactive creative games draw people from the blank world around them into the inventive process, encouraging them to imagine, to think of new ideas and images and events. We can cure the bland mind.
I’m sure there are other effective treatments. I imagine that fantasy and science fiction, whether in print or on the screen, can have such an impact. Some people are helped by this, but others either avoid these media or are unaffected. I would offer them a cure, a treatment that would move their thoughts into creative and interesting directions.
I am reminded that when chemotherapy works, that is no less a miracle from God than when someone is cured in a tent meeting, it’s just less dramatic. If our therapy works, that is also a healing from Christ; it was just mediated through a process in which we were involved.
So let’s heal some bland minds.
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