Or maybe what I want is a theology of competition. In particular: what kind of competition will there be in heaven?
Here’s what I mean: take stories. As the Lemony Snicket books so cleverly humorize, a book in which nothing bad ever does or could happen to the protagonist(s) is not a book anyone, generally speaking, is ever interested in reading. Stories (as far as I can tell) simply do not work without conflict; and conflict (as far as I can tell) always involves the possibility or reality of misfortune, or pain, or evil, or loss, or something else we wish (in our own lives) did not exist in the world. This doesn’t seem merely a question of verisimilitude, either; it’s not just that we find conflictless stories unrealistic — we find them boring. So what does that do for stories in heaven? My conclusion here has been that we won’t know till we get there, and that our fallen imaginations are part of what keep us from knowing — but there will be stories in heaven, and they will be interesting, and they will not depend for their interest on the presence of evil.
I need to find some kind of similar way to think about conflict in game-playing. Lately even chess has felt overwhelming and brutal (all that thinking ahead has always felt overwhelming, so I guess that part isn’t a change). But especially games like Risk, or other territorial games that have for their basic game-logic a version of the equation “scarcity + need = violence; violence + violence = a winner and a loser” have felt really difficult to enjoy.
And on the one hand, I think my feelings are right; the world is plenty brutal without our also killing each other in board games. But on the other hand, I feel like I am missing something. I don’t actually believe that in order to enjoy Risk (or chess, or Mafia), one must be a secretly homicidal maniac. Of course all these games can be played viciously and with intent to dominate and harm; but that’s not what I have in mind. I think they can also be played without that intent, and then I think they can be played with good aims, but aims that are still tied up in competition. So what are the good aims? What if competition is actually not about the high of winning, but about a process, and about learning that happens during that process? What’s that learning? How can we teach children (or forget children: how can I teach myself) to enjoy that in competing, rather than to enjoy the high of winning and dread the low of losing, and buy into the false belief that winning makes me more valuable and losing makes me less?