I admit it. I love football. For those of you who don’t, please indulge me. I love the beauty of a tight spiraling pass, the majesty of a fifty yard punt, the sudden burst up the middle by the tailback, the dazzling speed, the aerial catch, the linebacker’s instinct, the struggle of converging wills, the electricity arcing in the crisp air of a dappled autumn afternoon. Once I was watching a game at home, and my team missed a crucial field goal…instinctively I grabbed an African violet sitting peacefully in its pot on the coffee table…grabbed it by its leaves and jerked upwards. Apparently underestimating my own strength…the soil from the roots splattered upwards into the ceiling fan….you can imagine the rest…K was not amused. “Why would a grown man with reasonable intelligence care so much about a game?” She asked sternly. In hindsight I think that’s a good question.
Plato writes in the Republic about not just the pleasure of games, but of their necessity. For him they represent artfully, and incarnationally the human struggle, the human aspiration towards perfection, balance , and the beautiful…games involving the human body require discipline and courage, persistence and resilience…and then the joy that comes with victory…joy the state to which all humans aspire….the joy of the beautiful he calls it…and then the second chances following defeat. Games for Plato were the central metaphor, the outward and visible sign, for the life of the Polis…the gymnasium a central edifice thereof. If games were unimportant in our own day, why then would we be so caught up in their liturgical presence in our culture. Just ask a citizen of New Orleans if something as mundane as one game matters…We’ve heard New Orleaneans speak in the media over the past few days…We hear them say that the Super Bowl victory is the symbol of the new life taking root in post Katrina New Orleans…that it is a palpable symbol of new hope…that there is such a thing as happiness after all….the word for happiness for the Greeks is far richer than ours….eudaimoneo…which means exulting in the special favor of the divine….perhaps that’s why an all night prayer vigil was held at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans the day before the game.(and I thought only Alabama and Auburn fans prayed for victory)
My seminary classmates discovered all too soon my love for football. I would decry often in the dining hall the lack of Alabama football coverage in The Austin American Statesman…They tolerated my zeal, but gently dissuaded me from using football metaphors in sermons. But I can’t help it… the Saints’ win in Super Bowl forty four is indeed a metaphor worth paying attention to. Over the game’s preceding weeks the players all spoke of the game being about more than themselves, that it was about the city’s resurgence…indeed about the resurgence of the hurricane plagued Gulf Coast…and they meant what they said….They believed what they said…this patchwork of a team a metaphor for the resiliency of a patchwork community that has had to rely on their own collective genius to move ahead…for some to quite literally survive….through courage and discipline and persistence ….the game…a metaphor for life indeed…a metaphor for true community in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts….a metaphor for sacrifice that transforms…I think the venerable Plato would agree… but the people of New Orleans know…God bless dem Saints every one.
