I am glutton and gluttony is me.
I know, gluttony is one of the deadly sins. Gluttony and its sibling sins (lust, avarice, watching Jerry Springer) lead to other sins.
But that didn't stop me when my parents handed down their old big-screen TV. I plopped it in my basement… a full eleven inches from my 28-inch TV. Both are hooked up to cable. Both receive Fox Sports, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN Classic, TNT, and every other sports cable channel except the NFL Network. Both are situated within fifty feet of my beer refrigerator and a bathroom.
One evening last fall, I sat on my couch with two strong ales, my two TVs, the Detroit Pistons, the Detroit Red Wings, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Boise State/Fresno State. I felt like I was in a bar, but without the smoke, the need to tip, or the cheap women. My children were running around, so I was a little distracted, but other than that, I think I caught a glimpse of heaven that night.
Think I'm exaggerating?
Contemplation
The closest we can get to God on earth is contemplation. Aristotle thought that play bore characteristics of contemplation. Here's how Fr. James Schall explained it in his excellent book, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs:
Considering God and considering a game [have] something in common. Play and contemplation [are] alike in that both [are] activities indulged in "for their own sakes," whereas business and work [are] for something else. Games need not exist, just as the world need not exist, but both do… [W]atching a good game can be fascinating. It is its own world and time. It absorbs our attention in something that is not ourselves. Aristotle taught that our relation to God was not unlike that experience.
I think Schall and Aristotle are right. When we absorb ourselves in a game, we have a watered-down type of contemplation, and it's a good thing.
I experienced this last September at a Detroit Tigers game. Right after the national anthem, I sat in the upper deck, checked out the Detroit skyline, sipped my eight-dollar beer, and thought, "I have nothing to do for the next three hours, except sit here and enjoy the game." Within twenty minutes, I was absorbed: "Why is Leyland doing that?" "Check out Pudge." "I can't believe we're bringing in Perez."
I was detached from ordinary life. In that, it was contemplative.
Relaxation
But was I contemplating that night when I was watching the Pistons, Red Wings, Cavaliers, and Boise State? I don't think so. Notwithstanding the beer (a contemplative aid), I wasn't engaged in an activity that is akin to contemplating God. It was more pagan-like: watching many gods at the same time.
I'm not saying it wasn't a good thing. It was. I'd had a rough week. It was good for me to unwind, and it was good for my children and long-suffering wife to see me calm for the first time in days.
But I don't think it resembled contemplation. It was simple relaxation. It reminds me of a desert father story. A man walked by a desert monk's hut and saw the monk and brother monk lounging around in front, just chatting. The man derided them for not being occupied in prayer. The monk said, "A bow can't be taut all the time" (rough quote).
Relaxation and contemplation. Those are two good things about watching sports. There's a third approach to sports, but it's not very good: watching sports as a diversion.
Diversion
This is me and fantasy football: searching the waiver wires, making trades, obsessing about my point totals on Sunday afternoon. This is me placing petty bets on college football, NCAA hoops, and pretty much anything else with a ball in it. This is me channel surfing, watching highlight reels, and surfing the Internet for scores and stats.
Is it a bad thing?
A constant stream of diversions presents problems. Man naturally seeks diversions because they prevent boredom. Even better, they guard against boredom's wicked cousin, ennui, that "state of emptiness that the soul feels when it is deprived of interest in action, life, and the world (be it this world or another), a condition that is the immediate consequence of the encounter with nothingness, and has as an immediate effect a disaffection with reality" (Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature).
I like to stave off ennui. It's nasty stuff (and also a deadly sin, according to some ancient sources).
The problem is, we tend to take diversions seriously (think of the golfer) because we need them to preoccupy us in order to ward off ennui. But when we take them too seriously, they can erode our pursuit of higher things as we start to think the diversions really are important (the golfer who hits the links every Saturday instead of spending time with his kids).
More troubling, diversions numb us to the ultimate things, like death and final judgment. Diversions, Blaise Pascal pointed out, "amuse us and help us reach death imperceptibly."
That's a good thing for people who don't believe in eternity but are uneasy with their disbelief. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, "Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it."
But for Catholic men who believe in eternity and ought to be spending their lives preparing for it? It's not a good thing.
A moderate number of diversions are good, especially the sports types. They help us relax, and they might even lead to contemplative-like activity. But when are they too much? When do they cross the line into diversions that numb us to the prospect of death?
I don't know. Each man has to watch his own soul.
I'll watch mine as I keep watching my two TVs.
