Writing up introductions for like seven different new social media sites, I’ve realized I feel very shy about my work in spirituality, studying ttrpgs as ritual, and the links between my studies of meaning-making and my work as a game designer.
As someone who has been very wounded by religion and spiritual spaces myself, I’m often so cautious about bringing up these dimensions of what I do that I wind up not talking about them at all. I was raised in the kind of conservative Evangelical U.S. Christianity that spun tales of terror about tabletop roleplaying games and enforced white supremacy, capitalism, and every other entrenched system oppression on this continent. When I left — escaped — that world, I became intimately aware that I never wanted to weaponize religion in the way that it had been weaponized to harm me and so many others.
My own path with religion and spirituality has been a long and winding one, a journey that is difficult to summarize in the space of a single post. Suffice it to say that after years of questioning whether religion and spiritual practice was for me, whether there was anywhere I — with my ever-present desires to “live the questions” and to welcome my doubts as my greatest teachers — belonged, I found spaces of primary spiritual belonging in Jewish community (I’m in the process of becoming Jewish) and Unitarian Universalism. (Note to self: multireligious belonging is a whole other post.)
While in a Unitarian Universalist seminary program, I began to become more involved in the world of TTRPGs. As I was studying ritual and ways we form community and make meaning as humans, I was playing, GMing, and trying my hand at game design. I realized that there were so many aspects of tabletop spaces that were similar to spiritual spaces; the rhythms of a game mimic the rhythms of a rituals, and the stories we tell around game tables and in spaces of worship serve functions of meaning-making and connection.
For me, my work in spirituality and meaning-making is intimately linked to my process of game design and my approach to tabletop spaces in general. And, even though my handle is a declarative “@dungeonminister,” I find myself shy and hesitant to talk about all this. It’s a tender topic for me, and I know religion is a tender spot for so many others. I want to hear from others and share my own experiences, and I’m also skittish about introducing a topic of conversation that is so loaded for so many. (There’s another whole other post here about discussing religion and spirituality as a person who practices non-dominant forms of devotion in a culture with a dominant form of religion — U.S. Christianities being the dominant force in this case. Christianity and Christian hegemony so often dictate the terms of conversations around religion and spirituality, and I want to make spaces to center the experiences of those of us coming from the spiritual margins.)
So I’m curious: are folks interested in the intersections of meaning-making, spirituality, ritual, and tabletop? Is this a conversation others are hungry for? Is this a conversation that’s already happening?