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Gordon Preece on Sport and Spirituality

March 25, 2008

'When I Run I Feel God's Pleasure'

With Footy season on us again, here is an article taken from the Evangelical Alliance Journal. The full version including Credo Cricket will appear in the Interface Journal in May www.atfpress.com

In the 1981 Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, the film's hero Eric Liddell is literally running late for a mission meeting in a stark old Presbyterian church on a dark Edinburgh Sunday. Liddell apologises to his dour sister Jenny only to be delivered a real serve about his being perpetually distracted from the mission. Liddell then seeks to ease Jenny's worries concerning his vocation to the mission field, but after he runs in the Olympics. It is impossible to capture the passion and the Scottish accent on the page, but he says: 'God made me fast, Jenny, and when I run, I feel God's pleasure'. Whether Liddell actually made the statement in the film to Jenny (or her to him), it has the whiff of truth in terms of his overall philosophy.

Ian Charleson, who played Liddell in the film, described Liddell's inimitable running style of 'all arms and legs and head thrown wildly back .in the sheer exultation of the race' as due to the fact that '"He ran with faith. He didn't even look where he was going". Liddell's alleged statement is not only a magnificent moment in film, but in theology. It provides a stimulus for a long-overdue Protestant Play Ethic.

Defining Play and its Place in Life

Defining play, like other fundamental forms of human existence like love and work is difficult, but not impossible. Eminent child psychologist Jean Piaget notes succinctly that play is always done 'for the pleasure of the activity'. It is clear that Liddell plays when he runs, for all his strenuous effort and competitive spirit.

Johan Huizinga grasps some of the key features of play. For him play is:

A free activity standing quite consciously outside 'ordinary ' life as being 'not serious', but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. 'It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings'.

To define play we need to also define work. This is not to say one is primary and the other secondary, merely that they are paired, are symbiotic, and 'play' off each other. Pope John Paul II defined work too widely as equivalent to all human activity i.e. including play. It is 'everything that man accomplishes, whatever its nature or attendant circumstances' including procuring sustenance, developing arts and sciences, enhancing 'moral and cultural standards'.

Miroslav Volf's simpler and stricter definition of work is 'an instrumental activity serving the satisfaction of [creaturely] needs', outside our own need for the activity itself. Leisure is excluded as activity done mainly for itself - perhaps as a secondary goal to meeting needs, despite subjective overlap with work along a spectrum, e.g. in "a useful hobby"'.

In clarifying the outstanding characteristics and overlap between work and play an analogy with eating is perhaps helpful. Eating has necessary or need aspects for survival, social aspects and aesthetic or enjoyment aspects. 'Work, like eating, while primarily a necessity for survival and social flourishing, can and should secondarily be enjoyed in itself'. Leisure (including play), like eating, has all three aspects - we need leisure or refreshing, restful activity or inactivity, we have social leisure as relational beings and we can enjoy rest and recreation. Play as a sub-category of leisure or rest is primarily concerned with active enjoyment, but is social and can reflect certain needs, especially when it is paid. This would be significant if we had space to look at professional play or sport - as analogous to a useful hobby.

The notion of calling or vocation, as distinct from but including work (paid or unpaid) as one form of vocation may include things done, like the best work (though including need) and play, for their intrinsic value. The Protestant Reformers saw vocation as a playful delight - which, despite puritanical distortions and stereotypes, could include vacation, leisure or play. The whole of human existence is a means 'to glorify God' as in the Westminster Shorter Catechism's first question, but this by no means diminishes our enjoyment of God or our leisure, as Liddell knew. His abstaining from running the 1924 Olympic 100 metres on Sunday expressed his glorifying God and recognition of the Sabbath's and God's grounding of all enjoyment. So, when he ran, and won the 400 metres in world record time, he presuma bly 'felt God's pleasure', though the winning was not necessary. God delights in humans enjoying and fulfilling their created nature and gifts. The means echo the end and there is mutual divine and human pleasure.

Karl Barth relativizes work as 'significant play' in relation to the real work of reconciliation accomplished by Christ. In the light of God's coming kingdom, culture and work are serious, but not too serious. Barth's love of Mozart typifies this playfulness and lack of ultimate seriousness. Lest we take sport too seriously, Barth stresses the eschatological limit in the Sabbath and resurrection over against a cultural Protestant ethic that can make sport into a moralistic work. The 'true work of culture' including sport is not 'an unending process that reaches into the infinite' of God's Kingdom. Work, culture and sport have a provisional, playful sense, lest we view them too solemnly as a collegial cooperation with God.

In The Joy of Sports, Catholic thinker Michael Novak says forthrightly:

'Play, not work, is the end of life. To participate in the rites of play is to dwell in the Kingdom of Means . In a Protestant culture, as in Marxist cultures, work is serious, important, adult. Its essential insignificance is overlooked. play is reality. Work is diversion and escape'.

Novak is not nuanced. As a Catholic he enjoys putting down the Protestant Work Ethic. But his point that play is an end, with a purpose in itself, is well-taken.

Novak states categorically that sports are not just part of life, they are the heart of life. '[T]he heart of human reality is courage, honesty, freedom, community, excellence: the heart is sports'. Yet, it is not the only end, Novak notes.

'Sports are not, of course, all of life' - but they are its ethical essence. The virtues generated from sports should 'inform one's family life, civic life, political life, work life. What the person of wisdom needs to derive from every sphere of life is its inherent beauty, attraction, power, force'.. Sports civilize. 'Sports are the highest products of civilization and the most accessible, lived, experiential sources of the civilizing spirit . Cease play, cease civilization'.

Novak's defence of sport as an end in itself and his affirmation of the sporting virtues is well-taken. However, his inter-religious critique, broad civilizational generalizations, and absolutisation of American sports (in the way the baseball 'World Series' can be used to describe a purely US competition), risks going to the opposite extreme, his minor caveat aside. Sports may not be all of life, but they clearly make a totalising, imperial claim in his view. This endangers the nature of other spheres of life as ends in themselves.

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's distinction between internal and external goods of social practices can clarify the relationship of means to ends, across a wide range of activities, including forms of play. The internal good of play includes enjoying its end or 'internal goods' for their own sake. Enjoying and serving God and neighbour in the process of play is part of the social aspect that defines the practice of good play.

This may not exclude 'pay for play' since meeting creaturely needs is part of the external goods needed to maintain the internal good or 'heart' of this practice. However, it is a constant temptation to mistake means for ends, external goods like rewards - money, fame, success - as internal constitutive goods of the practice.

MacIntyre illustrates this regarding a child offered candy for winning at chess, which encourages cheating, or as I have seen, with children offered money for scoring goals they score at soccer/football. Similarly the insurance salesman playing golf with a prospective client to get a commission, though it is even less related to the actual play itself. This is a utilitarian misuse of the game. It is only really a game after business is suspended and the contract signed. As Huizinga noted earlier, play can have no ulterior or material interest (compare worship). Yet it does often have important secondary or indirect consequences such as reinforcing relationships with ourselves, others, the earth; emancipating and expressing our spirits; reconnecting to the wholeness of life; experiencing long-lasting joy . Sports have health benefits but they are best seen as a by-product. Otherwise why not just run on a treadmill in front of a TV?

The grace or aesthetic excellence of shared bodily exercise can help eradicate a passive sense of entertainment that distracts us from coming to terms with the 'junk' of our alienated, mortal bodies and the baptismal practice that enables us to come to terms with them. The practice of giving our bodies in baptism over to a dying and rising with Christ for God's and our pleasure, provides a link between spirituality and sport, from the more basic forms like walking to the more sophisticated forms like professional athletics.

Christine Ledger notes:

Physical activities, from the simple to the athletic, from a brisk walk to a marathon, remind us of both the abilities and the limitations of the body. Physical activities, practiced alone or with others, require discipline and repeated effort in a technological society where ease of transport and passive entertainment are encouraged. However, they engage us with our bodies and with the world in a way cars and television do not.

Ledger then cites Albert Borgmann elaborating on the example of running this way:

Running is simply to move through time and space, step-by-step. But there is a splendor in that simplicity. In a car we move of course much faster, farther and more comfortably. But we are not moving on our own power and in our own right. We cash in prior labor for present motion. Being beneficiaries of science and engineering and having worked to pay for a car, gasoline, and roads, we now release what has been stored and use it for transportation. What I am doing now, driving, requires no effort, and little or no skill or discipline. I am a divided person; my achievement lies in the past, my enjoyment in the present. But in the runner, effort and joy are one; the split between means and ends, labor and leisure is healed. the runner is mindful of the body because the body is intimate with the world . The mind becomes relatively disembodied when the body is severed from the depth of the world when is split into commodious surfaces and inaccessible machineries. Thus the unity of ends and means, of mind and body, and of body and the world is one and the same. It makes itself felt in the vividness with which the runner experiences reality.

While Liddell is more succinct and simple, he would have wholeheartedly agreed. Our challenge today is not to produce more Olympians, but more ordinary runners and walkers who can 'feel God's pleasure' for themselves and not merely by the proxy of passive entertainment of technology.

Posted by brent at March 25, 2008 10:41 AM