It took place last Friday and Saturday. As of this writing, I haven’t heard the results, but I’m interested.
I speculated elsewhere that the topics would include “Trash Talkin’ Your Brother,” “Liturgical Dance in the End Zone,” “Cheating and the Eighth Commandment,” and “Slashing, Hockey Fights, and Mercy.”
I’m being sarcastic, of course. I actually think a religious seminar on the role of sports in modern culture is appropriate. The Catholic Church needs to evangelize the culture, and that can’t be done if it neglects athletics. Sports are a multi-billion dollar affair, from international soccer fanaticism to the runaway marketing of the US’s MLB, NFL, NCAA, NBA, NHL, and all abbreviations in between, from four-year-olds on the baseball diamond to soccer moms in the stands.
I’m just hoping the seminar covered my favorite sport.
Watching.
Because that’s what I do. My knees don’t let me play much basketball and I haven’t played tennis in fifteen years. I never played football and never had access to hockey.
But I watch a lot of sports, especially football, basketball, and hockey.
Is it a bad thing? Lazy? Couch potato-like? Perhaps, but my viewing tendencies have some pretty good support.
James Schall, for instance. In his modern classic, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, he compares watching football to divine contemplation:
In caring more for watching a game of football than playing it, we attest, I think, to a kind of wonder, a kind of fascination about something taking place before us that absorbs our attention, if only for a moment…. Good games and sporting events are the normal and symbolic experiences most people have that might teach them to understand something of God, to understand how something could be for its own sake. This experience teaches us how it is possible that something we might contemplate is something we might contemplate forever if it were forever fascinating….
That’s pretty heady stuff, and I think he’s right.
When we watch a sporting event, we find ourselves absorbed in something that’s not ourselves. It points us outside ourselves and that, C.S. Lewis emphasized, is the crux of a healthy spiritual life. Indeed, combining Lewis’s and Schall’s points, I think it can be argued that watching sports — if done properly — is a naturally spiritual thing.
Perhaps I sound a little far-fetched right now.
But then tell me this: Why have sports assumed such a disproportionate role in our culture? We throw billions at it. Team names and popular athletes are brands in themselves. The lowest-paid players in the major pro leagues make hundreds of thousands to sit on the bench. Advertisers pay $2.25 million for a Superbowl commercial.
The attention we give it far exceeds any material interest we could possibly have in it. The average couch potato won’t earn anything for the hours he spends watching. From a “net monetary gain” standpoint, his attention is ludicrous.
So why does he do it? It’s not relaxation. Ask a true sports fan how he feels after his team is in a close game.
It’s something higher than mere bodily or material interest. It is, if only in a weak sense, spiritual, and that spirituality drives its abuse today.
Just because something is spiritual, after all, doesn’t mean it’s good. The devil is a spirit.
I think once we realize that sports appeal to something immaterial in us, we can get a better feeling for the role sports play in our culture.
And why the Pontifical Council for the Laity is wise to hold a seminar on the topic.
© Copyright 2005 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
