Infinite Games

a sermon preached by Tony Lorenzen

at First Parish Church in Weston, MA

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Most fathers have a repertoire of sayings and dad-isms that drive you absolutely up the wall stark raving mad if you heard them one more time you don’t know what you’re gonna do nuts. My dad had some of these sayings. One of his was, “There’s nothing so important in life you have to do it.”

When I was in high school and college and I was still young enough for my father to still be stupid, I didn’t realize that this dad-ism had a lot in common with a Buddhist teaching I’ve since taken quite to heart: There is nothing you must know. There is nothing you must do. There is nothing you must be. There is Biblical variant of this based on Psalm 46:

Be still and know that I am God

Be Still and Know

Be still

Be

My dad would tell me his Buddhist Dad-ism, his version of Be Still, when I was running around like mad, but going in circles, telling him I had to have this, I had to do that, I had to I had to I had to - imposing deadlines on myself for getting my latest newspaper article published, making an Amnesty International conference, winning some award at school. My dad wasn’t a Christian, he was a Native American agnostic, but what he was trying to tell me was, “What are you worrying about? Stop. Consider the lilies of the field. Consider first the Kingdom of God.”

I was an English major in college and none of my friends were English majors. They were business majors and economics majors. The fringe crowd among them were communications majors. I worried about what I was going to do after graduation when all my friends were getting jobs and making money. “Don’t.” My dad said, “The person who dies with most toys doesn’t win.”

 Do what you need to do, he was trying to tell me. Life isn’t a game. It’s strange how we treat it like one, though, with everyone scampering about to get the next big thing. Keep up with the Joneses. For what? To win the Rat Race? It’s not even a Rat Race any more; it’s an entire track meet. What do you win if you win the rat race or the track meet? Whatever it is, you can’t take it with you. And yet we get so caught up in this type of existence. 

Writer and professor of religion James P. Carse posits “there are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.”[1]

We treat life like it’s a finite game, as if the purpose was winning. How does one win life? Does one get somewhere first? Does one beat the other players? Does one accumulate the most points? Who’s keeping score?

Some folks think they’re playing an infinite game just because they are religious. Just because they show up at church on Sunday at 10:30 and leave church because it’s 11:30 on Sunday. But as Anne of Green Gables observed, there’s a big difference between praying and saying your prayers. Only you know which one you are: a pray-er or a sayer-of-prayers.

Our focus on Voluntary Simplicity points us inward to take a look at the game we with play with our spiritual life. Is it a finite game? Do we engage in the spiritual life as just another task in our day or week, something else on our agenda, something to finish or win? Or do we engage in the life of the spirit as repose, time to just be, to revel in the journey. Are we spending are time trying to get into heaven or making time for the paradise around us now?

Rabi’a al-Adawiyya is a famous Sufi mystic and saint. She lived in Basra, Iraq in the 8th century and the stories of her say she was consumed with the fire and love and longing for the Beloved, her name for Allah or the divine.

One story about her is that one day she was seen running back and forth throughout the city carrying a flaming torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other hand. When asked what she was doing she said. “I am going to light a fire in Heaven and pour water on Hell.” [2]

You see, Rabi’a was just fed up with people who thought the spiritual life was all about trying to get into Heaven or avoid Hell. I like her. She can be one of my saints.

She knew about finite and infinite games. If the spiritual life is about avoiding hell and getting into heaven it’s about playing to win, it ignores the journey too much. As Rabi’a thought, spending too much time worrying about heaven or hell was time taken away from time we could be spending in the divine presence NOW.

The gospel reading today is about the difference between finite and infinite games and the difference in attitude between those who play each. If we seek first the Kingdom of God – divine things, what else is there to worry about? But more importantly, if we seek the world of the spirit and live our lives that way, we create a different world.

I used to illustrate this with my high school theology students by having them play musical chairs. We did this in chapel this year as well. We would play two games of musical chairs. The first game was musical chairs as it’s known in parlors and gym halls everywhere. You circle the chairs while music plays. The music stops. You scramble for a seat. If you are not sitting after the scramble, you’re out. Next round. Round after round players are eliminated. In a short while there are only two players left and one chair. The music stops a final time, one player gets the chair and is the winner. The game is over. There is a victor. It’s a finite game.

Then we would play a second time, but this time with a change in the rules. When the music stops, if you don’t have a chair, you can sit in someone’s lap. It usually takes a while for the players to figure out that no one has to lose; that they are no longer playing a finite game, that the purpose now is to continue the play, to keep everyone in, not get people out. Finally there is one chair left, and then none. How do you seat everyone with no chair? You make a circle and everyone sits on the lap of the person behind them, a circle - infinite. Life is an infinite game. The living and learning is in the journey, not the destination. The purpose: to continue the play.

The difference between game one and game two was one simple rule, but that’s a major difference between finite and infinite games. “In a finite game the rules can not change during play, but in an infinite game, the rules must change during the course of play.” [3] In our musical chairs example, that rule change was the difference between the finite and the infinite game; the difference between playing to win and playing to continue the play. The first musical chairs game represents the world as it is: dog eat dog, everyone for themselves, get ahead at all costs, survival of the fittest. And that game is usually won by fast, strong, sneaky and conniving players – just like real life in many ways. The second game represented life as it could be if we all lived by the teaching of the gospel or any other great spiritual system. Jesus, Buddha, Mohamed - they all taught us basically the same things - love each other, work together, include the weak and the sick, take care of everyone, share what you have with those who don’t. What if we actually lived it instead of just believed in it. That was game two – an infinite game, a game aimed at forever instead of living for today.

Of all the lessons and activities I used to do with my theology students, musical chairs was probably the most powerful. It’s point didn’t need to be made. They knew what kind of world they lived in. So do you. The question is: What type of world will you help create?

We create the rules for our children, we teach them the game. At some point voluntary simplicity has to become more than a nice Lenten theme, it has to become a lifestyle choice. It has to become the rules of the game. We must decide, as the bumper sticker says, to live more simply so that others may simply live. It makes a difference, a big difference, on the scale of the very small and the very large, the personal and the global.

Today is Unitarian Universalist Service Committee Justice Sunday. The UUSC deals with problems of societal and global injustice. Justice Sunday this year asks us to focus on its featured topics, among them Worker’s Rights and a Living Wage.

The Living Wage is close to my heart as an issue because when I was the Green Party candidate for Lt. Governor here in Massachusetts in 2002, this issue was a major part of our platform. The Living Wage is more than a minimum wage. A minimum wage seeks the lowest common denominator – what’s the lowest wage we can get away with paying a worker by law. A living wage seeks an hourly wage that actually allows workers the pay necessary to provide for their families and pay their bills.

“The federal minimum wage was set through the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 which also set standards for overtime pay and restricted child labor. The Fair Labor Act sought to eliminate conditions detrimental to the maintenance of minimum standards of living necessary for the health, efficiency and well being of workers.”[4]

The federal minimum wage has been at $5.15 an hour since 1997. Set too low, approaching a decade without a cost of living increase or adjustment for inflation, this minimum wage is doing the opposite of what the Fair Labor Standards Act intended.[5]

Today's minimum wage is not a fair wage, or a living wage. It is a poverty wage. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage buys less today than it did when the first Wal-Mart opened as Sam Walton's 5 and 10 in 1951. When MLK gave his I have a Dream Speech, A key component of the demands that weekend was a national living wage adjusted minimum wage. The inflation adjusted minimum wage for 1963 would be $6 and hour today. When MLK died in 1968 the inflation adjusted minimum wage from 1968 would be worth $9 per hour today.[6]

Wages are a social justice issue, an issue that puts into focus whether or not our society is one that sees life as an finite game where some win and some lose or an infinite game where we all work together, allowing each other to continue the play. Consider this and consider whether we're really all in this together in America:

· In 1991 Family health care cost 1/4 the yearly income of a minimum wage worker.

· In 1998 Family health care took half the yearly minimum wage worker’s income.

· In 2005 health care for a family of four cost $10,880 and a full time worker earning minimum wage in the US makes only $10, 712.[7]

In a speech earlier this month at Wake Forest Divinity School Bill Moyers noted that a 2005 study by the Economist, a very pro-capitalist publication, offered a “sobering analysis of what is happening in America. They found great and growing income disparities. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was 30 times the pay of the average worker; today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker.”[8]

Why are worker’s rights and other injustices constantly problems for the human race, the human condition. Perhaps it’s because we never learn to play infinite games. We never learn to stop trying get to the top of the heap, beat the other person. We never really try to live with each other, help each other, understand the other, know the other. We never really get interested in just continuing the play. And thus we never teach these things to our children.

Our children thus learn the way the world works, and they learn it at an ever increasingly early age. They learn: I must get ahead, I must learn skills for a global economy, I must learn how to make money, I must learn how to survive and take care of myself. They learn the rules of the finite game and by the time they are in high school they have the daily and weekly schedules of corporate executives. After all that’s what we’re training them to be in order to survive in the finite game. If the pressure gets to be too much, what do they do? They escape - much the way other corporate executives escape - a drink, a drug, a fling with friends, a sexual adventure to release the stress.

What if we taught our children how to better play the infinite game? What if we really taught them so that they thought: I want to learn how to create a more just economic system that pays a living wage to all workers? I want to learn to speak the languages of my global village, I want to learn how to more equitably distribute the world’s resources, I want to learn how we can better take care of one another. They would still have difficulties and problems and the issues of growing up would not disappear. There would still be addiction and depression and teen-age angst to deal with, but my guess is that their problems might be less severe and of a different nature.

A few years back I received a phone call from a former high school student of mine. She was calling seeking a recommendation. She wanted to enter a program that would send her to Africa to teach economics and institute a system of micro loans to women in Zimbabwe so that they could start a cooperative bakery and also to teach English and math skills to children as a volunteer tutor in local schools.

“Wonderful,” I said, “Good for you. That’s great. What do I need to do?”

“Well,” she said, and her voice started to shake, “I’d have to take a leave of absence from college to do this…” She let the sentence hang in the air at the other end of the line.

“So?” I said, “So what?”

“Thank God, Mr Lorenzen,” she said, “Thank you.”

“What?” I said.” “What’s wrong?”

“You’re the first person who’s agreed to write the recommendation and I need at least one recommendation from someone who knew me before college. No one would do it.” She sobbed and couldn’t continue for a few minutes.

“All my life,” she said, “I went to Catholic schools and everyone told me how I should help the poor and give to the needy and social justice this and that, but when I finally go and decide to act like Mother Teresa, everyone tells me I’m crazy and wasting my time and derailing my future. No Lie, even Father….” Here she inserted the name of the high school chaplain, the guidance counselor and listed a half-dozen teachers.

“You should’ve called me first,” I said half joking

“I did,” she said, “but you had moved.”

It was true. We had moved, and so had she. We had bought a house across town. She had stopped playing finite games. She had finally internalized the lessons she was taught all her life, only to find that the words of those lessons, were in many ways, just lip service from parents and teachers and priests and counselors.

She ended up going to Zimbabwe and when she returned, she came to the school I was then teaching at and told my students about it. By then I had taken up the practice of telling students who informed me that they didn’t know if they wanted to go to college, to take a year or two off – Go to Zimbabwe or Brazil or Guatemala or somewhere. There’s no rule that says you have to go to college immediately. Some parents didn’t like it at all. But we were playing different games, those parents and I. Going to college is a good and right path for many, for most even, but not all young people following high school. Life isn’t a race or a game we play to win, but just to play. It’s in the journey we live, there’s no destination, continue the ride.

Don’t play to win. Play to continue playing. Play an infinite game. Most importantly, stop and teach the infinite game to your children. For although you will find many finite games to play and teach by explicit rule or example to your kids, as James P. Carse says, “there is but one infinite game.”[9]

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[1] Carse, James P. Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility. New York: Ballantine, 1986. p. 3

[2] http://www.mythinglinks.org/NearEast~3monotheisms~Islam~Rabia.html

[3] James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games. Pp10-11

[4] source http://www.letjusticeroll.org/pdfs/AJustMinimumWage.pdf pp 1-2, 8-10

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/03/22/a_time_for_heresy.php

[9] James P. Carse. Finite and Infinite Games. p. 177