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I always have trouble picking just one class.
No, I'm not talking about enrollment at college. And, no, I'm not talking about which team to side with in the coming Marxist revolutions.
I'm talking about when I play games like Dungeons and Dragons and I have to choose between being someone who carries a sword, someone who throws fire with his hands, or someone who can heal his friends.
I was the idiot trying to bend the rules and "multiclass". (I was the same way with Magic the Gathering, always trying to build an extra color deck when the format simply did not allow it.) You can't fault me for dreaming!
Dreaming is what I'm doing in my Uber-Forever Game of Real Life RPGing, or, maybe, LARP Christian Wizardry.
Whatever its made up name is today, it's sent me on something of an identity quest as I try to nail down just what kind of "build" I rolled out here in the real world. Am I a natural Inventor with Bardic aspirations? Or am I the Wizened Caster of ancient Words of power? What about my day job as Arch Cleric of a local temple to the Almighty Deity?
Though not called to battle officially, as a second-amendment loving citizen of this great United States, I've also been looking upon my leather-bound Bible as a "Paladin's prayer-book." This, if nothing else, has granted me more than a few thankful moments with some old pages.
It is all entirely made up and meaningless, of course. At the same time, all of it is quite filled with meaning: intentional meaning: symbols and metaphors and messages filled with authentic Christian substance.
It has it been a stunningly easy thing to do. I sit and reimagine the view from my patio as the view from post-apocalyptic Sanctuary Hills, myself not a sole survivor so much as an ambassador representing a rogue state, tasked on a Jason Bourne-esque mission to infiltrate the thought-culture on behalf of the King of the Universe himself.
Not a bad hook, eh?
And that's without adding any inspiration for coronavirus points!
What has surprised me in this little daydreaming game is how hard it was for me to admit that my personal base class is Inventor, which really just means, "a rogue who can't fight".
That's kind'a embarrassing.
I had never really imagined myself as an inventor. (I am a perennial sniper or healer in most gaming scenarios.) My thoughts run several directions on this. I'm afraid it will be a bit muddled as we conclude.
It seems to me that, once upon a time, (as stories always must go,) great science and great philosophy were not done in ivory towers by magical superiors. Rather, discoveries and learning are the children of hobby garages where men of the earth who love their labor find that they love their curiosity even more.
Where is the time in the week for such men as these again?
It bothers me how much luster has been stripped away from my attempt to self-imagine myself as I am: a tinkering, sometimes absent-minded, bard with a knack for tale, and strategy, and perspective. Where does such a character fit in modernity’s cold, bottle-fed expectations?
For my part, all of this pondering unleashed a rebellious joy in me as I realized that my ramshackle table/standing-desk/storage tool/second-desk/thingy is, in fact, my bardic inventor's workbench, bardically invented by me for the sole purpose of further bardic inventing of bardically invented thingys.
This, if nothing else, made me smile on a Thursday afternoon. I hope it makes you smile whenever you read this too. And, perhaps, gird up your loins to join my quest to recapture the reality of the Christian imagination applied to pious living.
Now's as good a Monday as any.
Don't wallow in the muck.
Rev. Fisk
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