In his Christmas message, The Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, urges us to look to the example of children and give ourselves time to enjoy the world

I READ the other day that whales spend roughly two thirds of their time playing and only one third on necessary things like searching for food.

My wife and I have been keen whalewatchers whenever we've had the chance, and they have indeed sometimes looked as though they're playing. The humpbacks, in particular, leap right out of the water and land with an almighty splash and the scientists haven't figured out any good reason why they do it other than that it's great fun. (Well, if you were the size of two or three London buses and could make that kind of a splash, you'd enjoy it too.) So I wasn't completely surprised, except by the proportion of time involved. Many animals seem to spend all their time hunting, grazing, eating or sleeping. How come the whales do so much more playing than most of the others - ourselves included?

The answer might just be that they are more intelligent.

Some of them have brains the size of a small car. (I know size isn't everything, but all the indications are that they are at least as smart as us, perhaps a lot more so). But surely, someone will say, isn't play just trivial? Shouldn't life be more serious?

Isn't play what children do, something we grow out of when we become adults?

Well, if we do, the more fool us. Maybe one of the reasons why we get ourselves in such a mess in our adult world right now is because we don't play enough. We squeeze it out of our hectic lives, except for brief holidays - when we sometimes find we've lost the habit of relaxing and enjoying ourselves, and can't wait to get back to work where we know where we are. Perhaps it's time to take a lesson from the whales.

And from the children. Because - it's obvious when you think about it, but even thinking gets squeezed out of our busy lives - if God became a little child at Christmas, that must mean that God played: God burbled in his cot, God chuckled at the sheep and the donkeys, God patted his mother's hand, God played peep-bo' with Joseph.

And actually the Bible says that God plays with the whales, too.

One of the Psalms declares that that's why he made them in the first place, to have a great creature to play with. One of the ancient rabbis suggested, on that basis, that God divided the day into three parts, in two of which he was running the world and in the third of which he was playing with the whales. A nice thought, that. If the new research is right, half of the whales' playtime is by themselves and the other half is with God.

What is play, after all? Play is, fundamentally, enjoying the goodness of God's world, of being alive, of the possibilities open to us, without the need to achieve anything, to prove anything, to do anything except celebrate. When you see someone totally absorbed in play you see a human being totally alive. No matter whether they are six months or 60 years old - though you're more likely to see the baby absorbed in play than the middle- aged. Again, more's the pity.

If Christmas is about the birth of the child, it's also about the risk to children in a grown-up world where play is a luxury we think we can do without.

Just three days after Christmas, the church commemorates the holy innocents' - the babies who were killed on the orders of Herod the Great. I doubt if he played, except sadistically with other people's bodies or lives, for many years. Instead, he spent most of his time trying to outwit the people he suspected of plotting against him. Including children.

It's an awful picture of a grown-up world forcing its agendas on to children, robbing them not only of their play but of their very lives.

Yet this picture isn't so far from today's reality. There are many parts of the world where children are bringing one another up because all the adults in their world have died of Aids.

There are children whose whole lives consist of foraging for food, or scraps to sell, on stinking rubbish heaps. There are children forced to become killers, playing at soldiers but with real guns. Others are forced into the sex trade.

The loss of play becomes a signpost to other losses, not least the loss of childhood itself. Innocent casualties of an adult world that has forgotten how to celebrate the glory and goodness of creation, all such children are to be mourned with Herod's victims.

But supposing the whales, and the children, have got it right. Supposing the world is meant to be a place of delight and wonder, where we can enjoy being what we're made to be without always feeling that we have to run faster, to achieve more and more, to work longer hours, to cancel time off because there's more to do, and not least to watch our backs, like Herod, in case someone's out to get us. Oh, there's another thing about whales: they don't understand what's happening when someone attacks them, because they aren't suspicious. They don't have predators.

Other than humans, of course. We have done to whales what adults have done to children; what Herod did to the innocents.

In his Christmas message, The Bishop of Durham, the Rt Rev Tom Wright, urges us to look to the example of children and give ourselves time to enjoy the worldM/i>

But if Christmas is about the child in the manger, it's also about the priority of play. Take time this Christmas to play with a child. Not simply to keep the children amused. To learn, by their example, what it means to be human. To be intelligent. To be, dare I say, Godlike.