GRABBINGSAND

Gary Gygax is dead. He created Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

I never met him. But I owe him a debt of gratitude that requires some explanation.

When I was a teenager, I was into Christian Rock up to my elbows. The genre seemed a reasonable compromise between the music I wanted to hear and the messages I needed to receive. Little did I know then that there was and is spirituality to be had from so many other genres and forms of music. But I was young and naive. I loved Petra most of all. To this day, I count a Petra show at Chattanooga’s Memorial Auditorium as my first rock music. And I was able to go because I’d convinced my youth minister it was a good idea. After that first concert, our youth group went to others.

One of these subsequent shows featured a performer named Carman. Carman’s specialty was the way he performed these witty and profound speak-songs. Though he had a reasonable vocal range, there were these songs where he’d leave the singing behind and start telling a story, building up momentum in the telling until finally coming to some kind of heroic epiphany of Biblical truth. I remember one about the story of Lazarus. You remember that one, right? Lazarus has died, so his sister comes to Jesus and asks for a miracle. Simple, but not good enough as-is for Carman. So the way Carman performs it, the story becomes a kind of Biblical fan-fiction free-for-all. While Jesus is standing outside the tomb, getting ready to make with the raising, Lazarus is in some kind of Heavenly jam session, surrounded with an assortment of previous prophets from days gone by. Isaac, Abraham, Samson and so forth. For some reason, they’re asking Lazarus how he’s cool enough to hang with them. So he starts name-dropping and saying what all he’s seen the Messiah do from his peripheral vantage point. From there, we start split-screening between Heaven and the tomb, like so …

“I even remember the littlest things
The things that most folks would forget
Like the simple, loving way He’d just call my name.”
Up at the grave, the stone rolled away …
With a loud voice Jesus started to say, Lazarus.
“You see it just seems like yesterday
I could hear that man saying my name”
Lazarus
“As a matter of a fact it seemed like today.”
Lazarus
“Excuse me brothers I think I hear him calling me now.”
Lazarus
“Jesus?”
Lazarus
“Hey, Jesus!”
Lazarus, Come Forth
Come Forth, I command you, Come Forth!

Hey, Jesus!

So that’s how it went. And you can imagine that with the right kind of triumphant music, even the most hard-hearted person might be so moved to overlook the utter ridiculous of outright Biblical fan-fiction (and the uncomfortable familiarity of Lazarus, Jesus’s Pal) and raise a hand or two to heaven. Push it a bit further, and you might have yourself the starting fervor of an altar call. So now you’ve got a whole concert hall full of folks and scores of volunteers standing by to pray with those who might wish to find their salvation right then and there. And for the rest of us, myself included, earnest at the age of twelve or thirteen and wanting nothing but to be a good Christian kid, we stayed up in our rows, standing with our heads bowed as Carman started slinging out the prayer and confession suggestions.

I don’t remember most of what was mentioned. I’m pretty sure that the big ones were pitched, things like “If there are any of us here tonight who’ve found themselves a slave to the perils of alcohol or drugs.” I could answer negatively to either, so I was in the clear. And the list carried on from Carman’s microphoned mouth, a litany of forgotten possible sins, until this moment that has since been crystallized in my memory.

And if there are any among you, teenagers who have fallen prey to heavy metal, rock and roll.

I’m sure my eyes were closed up to that point, but I’m betting they fluttered a bit.

And maybe there are others who have played …

I knew it was coming. Somehow, I just felt it.

Who have played Dungeons & Dragons …

He pulled out both syllables of both words like they were poison. And in that instant, I stopped bowing my head. I opened my eyes and looked around. I wanted to leave. Suddenly, I felt like I didn’t belong in that place, with those people, hearing that man. I’d never experienced doubt so absolutely. Looking back, the wave of resistance started with his general condemnation of secular rock and roll, but as soon as he dropped the ball on D & D, he crossed the line. He’d called one of my favorite childhood activities out on the carpet, simultaneously grouping it with a host of far more obvious sins and transgressions.

And I knew he was wrong. I knew it. If there is such a thing as an intellectual awakening, that was it.

I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time not in some neighbor kid’s basement, but at school. My elementary school enrichment teacher, Ms Cooper, she decided that a dice-based role playing game was just the thing to fire the imaginations of her little circle of gifted students. And she was so very right, because I took to it like a duck to water. I wrote stories for the characters I rolled and drew out adventurers, often on graph paper. I invented magical swords and created quests for my friends to play, as many of us carried on into junior high with our various campaigns. And there was nothing the least bit evil about it, because the driving force behind it all was only the extent of my own God-given imagination.

And if imagining is a sin, then why have such a gift at all?

So thank you, Gary Gygax. Thank you for Dungeons & Dragons. Thank you for giving me a way to recognize for the first time in my young life the beauty and sanctity of my own mind.

Do I still play? No. Not so much. It could be argued, of course, that my fascination with fantasy video games stems from D & D. But it’s been years since I crowded around a table and created a collaborative story with a pack of imaginative friends and a handful of dice. And yet … I do keep a 20-sided die on my computer keyboard at home.

Just in case.