What Does it Mean to “Play God”?
A few weeks ago, I read two news articles, which, together, returned me to a very important set of questions: what is God like and how does one go about “playing God”? The first article was a look back at the tragic shootings which took place at Columbine High School, ten years ago. The author of the piece writes of one of the killers:
Harris seemed to feel superior to everyone — he once wrote, “I feel like God and I wish I was, having everyone being OFFICIALLY lower than me” — while Klebold was suicidally depressed and getting angrier all the time. ‘Me is a god, a god of sadness," he wrote in September 1997, around his 16th birthday.
Minutes later, I happened to read Bono’s Op-Ed piece in the New York Times where he writes about worshipping in an African church where the “parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.”
Both excerpts raise important questions about who and what is meant when we use the word, ‘God’. And, further, if we have been “created in the image of God”, and if being fully human is, in some way, to mimic our Creator, then the question arises: how do we best perform the role? Do we best impersonate God by acting out a superiority complex – imposing our way, speaking in a shout, reminding others of their lower place? Or do we better catch the nuances and subtleties of how God is God by enacting reciprocity, sacrificial love and self-surrender?
