(First published in Reality magazine)
I recently read the story of a school party where one of the games involved tying a balloon round the ankle of each child. The object of the game was to stomp on other people's balloons without getting yours broken. The winner was the last person with an intact balloon. The first class of children entered into the game with vigour (although not without a few tears and bruised feet as well as feelings).
The next class to play was the special needs class for intellectually handicapped children. They had some difficulty understanding the instructions for the game. But eventually they got the idea that the balloons were to be popped. So they set about helping each other to achieve this end. Some children held their balloons steady so classmates could more easily stomp on them. Others popped their own balloons. When the final balloon exploded the whole class cheered with delight. They had done it!
These so-called intellectually handicapped children had instinctively made the game one of co-operation: a team effort where everyone contributed to the common goal and where all shared the corporate sense of achievement. Competitiveness was not part of their natural framework. Winning as an individual at the expense of everyone else didn't occur to them. Friends were there to help and be helped as necessary. This was a party after all, not a war!
I was moved and challenged by this story. Which group of children really were the "special needs" group? And what were the adults modelling by suggesting such a game in the first place? Are competition and the win-lose mentality so ingrained in our social culture that we think it is fun to stomp on each other? Oh I know it was only balloons that were stomped on - or was it? What about the feet and the feelings as well?
Adults not only teach such games to children, we play them ourselves too. Much more subtly, of course. For example: the biting comment that crushes someone's reputation and keeps mine intact; the clever joke that casues laughter which deeply hurts the person or people laughed at; the caustic criticism which ensures that the weakness of someone else is in focus and not mine; the arrogant disregard for someone else's sensitivities to show how liberated I am... Adult versions of balloon stomping abound.
What if we took on board the game plan of the special needs class? Could we help each other to eliminate weaknessness, blind spots, vulnerabilities, pride and insecurity by seeing this as a team effort? Is it possible to conceive of a community in which I bring my "balloon" of ego to a friend and ask for help to deflate it? Can you imagine joining forces with others to counteract weaknesses and then cheering together at the outcome? What would happen if instead of criticising we wondered what the person in question might be feeling or needing? ... Maybe we'd find ourselves playing a whole new game.
We are so familiar with the theory of being "one body" that I sometimes wonder if we have settled into certain relatively comfortable applications of that analogy and completely ignored others. What sense does it make to compete with another member of the body? About as much sense as one of my legs trying to prove it can run faster than the other! What is actually achieved if I cut another person down in order to raise myself up? About the same as what is achieved if I use my right hand to inflict a deep knife wound on my left.
Instinctively those special needs children knew that their survival, and their enjoyment, lay in co-operation not in competition. I'm sure they were neither Biblical scholars nor theologians but perhaps they were living the truth of Ephesians 4:15-16 better than most of us:
"...we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love."
