Religious Hope In Sports

Once you trans­form your work into play you have it made. The sec­ond you start tak­ing it all too seri­ously you have stepped off the crazy cliff. Step back a few paces from life and take a look at it. Life is filled with silly con­tra­dic­tions. There is even a built in glitch in our egos that makes us look like fools when we are the most proud of some­thing we have done. Life is a com­edy of errors that some­how keeps work­ing. We are still here — despite our efforts to pol­lute life out of exis­tence or war it away.

Per­son­ally, I attribute it to our abil­ity to play. With­out week­end sports and hob­bies, we would all be in the streets at each oth­ers’ throats over the pet­ti­ness of who gets what or who con­trols the sys­tem. Some­where in the world there is a game in progress right now (pray for ESPN to air it). The most shared event each year is the Super Bowl. It has a world­wide audi­ence sec­ond to none. Lots of peo­ple watch the game but do not under­stand it in the least (as if any­one could fully do that any­way). Despite the fact that peo­ple pull for one of the two teams, they are still able to expe­ri­ence a mutual event in rel­a­tive harmony.

I used a text­book once, in teach­ing a col­lege course on reli­gion, which clas­si­fied some “every­day” activ­i­ties as reli­gions. Mon­day night foot­ball is clas­si­fied as a reli­gion (I am not jok­ing). It has a spe­cial time des­ig­na­tion (Mon­day night), rit­ual drama (every­thing from the coin toss to the tro­phy), gods and god­desses (the play­ers and the cheer­lead­ers), spe­cial cloth­ing (includ­ing color coded attire for the wor­ship­pers in the stands), scrip­ture (the rule book), high priests (the ref­er­ees), com­mu­nion (Gatorade, beer, soft drinks and all of the foods a tail­gate party can sup­ply), and sac­ri­fi­cial vic­tims (injured play­ers and the entire los­ing team). Vir­tu­ally all peo­ple involved pray (that their team wins and the other one loses). There are chants, pil­grim­ages, incan­ta­tions, spells cast, and sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial involve­ment. There is divine judg­ment (the call of the ref­eree stands) and an apoc­a­lyp­tic siren (the two minute warn­ing). Media com­men­ta­tors are sages and prophets from on high (in the skybox).

Com­pany morale has more to do with the NFL and the NBA than the com­pany psy­chol­o­gist or chap­lain. Cheer­ing for the same team can over­come polit­i­cal and some­times even reli­gious dif­fer­ences. Sports can unite mag­i­cally across the great gen­der divide (if your spouse agrees with you on your favorite team, your mar­riage has a much greater chance of sur­viv­ing, if not…).