Put a Wizard in your
Party
(This is my August article for the newsletter of the church where I serve, Zion Lutheran: www.facebook.com/ziontinley)
One of the really helpful articles Pastor Dave gave me when
I arrived at Zion was a National Geographic article from a few years back on “Teenage
Brains.” (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text
)
It’s a good read, and it sums up recent research into how
the brains of adolescents function differently than the brains of older
adults. As I understand it, adolescent
brains are better at learning, better at making new connections, and less risk-adverse
than other (older) brains. Which, of
course, made me think of Dungeons & Dragons.
As I’ve mentioned to some of you, I play Dungeons &
Dragons whenever I can. D&D (as we
call it for short) is a great opportunity to goof off with friends, to do
collaborative improv storytelling, and have wacky cooperative fun. But for the sake of today’s column, you just
need to know that most D&D parties (teams, groups) try to be balanced: you
want a fighter, you want some other folks, and you want a wizard. The fighter is hard to kill, so the goblins
can beat on her for a bit while the rest of your team gets ready to
respond. The cleric heals your party and
keeps them in the game. The rogue sneaks
around and disarms traps. And the
wizard? The wizard does everything
else.
When it’s time for somebody to hit the troll with a stick,
wizards are not where you look. But when
you come across something you’ve never seen before, some situation that seems
impossible, some massive horde of enemies or some unsolvable riddle- then you
want a wizard in your party. Wizards
bring unmatched versatility to the table: maybe they’ll throw a wall of fire up
to protect your party, maybe they'll turn the evil dragon into a caterpillar,
or maybe they’ll just grant everyone flight to escape a threat. They can discern lies, find the right
direction, summon angels, and conjure up a magical platform to carry your stuff
for you. In short, they are the Swiss
Army knife of Dungeons and Dragons: don’t leave the tavern without one.
But there’s a problem with wizards. The game tries to have the various roles be
balanced, so wizards are “squishy.” If
one gets too close to a horde of orcs, they’ll fall quicker than any of the
other characters. They can’t stand up to
damage, and so they need the rest of the party to protect them- to keep them alive
so that they can fall back and do their awesome, versatile, magical thing.
Maybe you see where I’m going with this. Adolescents are just better than we are when
it comes to thinking! They see new
solutions more quickly, they make more graceful connections between disparate
parts of a question, and they will keep coming up with things to try until
something works. That’s why, throughout
human history, adolescents have been the ones to push on boundaries, to try new
things, to question established orders.
But the flip side of that is a decreased attention to risk, a mind that
is less willing to account for possible negative outcomes- that’s
neurologically one of the reasons adolescents engage in various risk
behaviors. So, I think it’s up to the
rest of us: the clerics and the fighters and the rogues, the ones among us who
can hold the line, the ones among us who can heal wounds, the ones among us who
can get rid of traps before they hurt somebody- (the non-adolescents who love
and support adolescents)- to step up.
Which leads me to my invitation: given my premise that one
should never leave the tavern without a wizard in one’s party, I also want to
say that one shouldn’t try to do the work of the church without an adolescent
in the room. I am so excited to have
teenagers helping on the Evangelism Team and on the team of older folks
supporting confirmands this year. But I
think there are a lot of other opportunities to invite young people into
ministry at Zion. We have many awesome,
wizardly young people at Zion, and I think we miss out by not learning more
from them, by not inviting them to participate more actively in God’s work at
Zion.
So: the next time you’re sitting in a committee meeting, or
at a service project, or even in worship, and you start to think about why
things aren’t going quite right: things could be faster, things could be more
innovative, things could be wackier or more fun, things could be riskier-
consider whether the Spirit might be calling you to invite a young person into
the collaboration.
We are blessed with wizards among us. May we remember to invite them into the work,
may we help to keep them safe and thriving, may we learn to follow their
lead. It will be like magic.
