The Closest Thing to Contemplation

When great people you have known are dead, their influence on you takes a different form. Parents and extended family and even their friends – if you’ve been lucky enough to have had them in these troubled days – assume an almost mythological status.  We didn’t need Freud or Jung to spell this out. Most of us already knew it in our bones. Much of later life, then, becomes a series of starts and stops in conversation with persons dead and forgotten, then remembered, again and again, as we make our way through our own dusty days.

T.S. Eliot got it just right in “Little Gidding”:

            what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

You may be wondering by now, dear reader, where all this is headed. I won’t keep you in suspense. It’s the necessary prelude to a subject dear to many hearts: the seriousness of sports.

This past weekend, like a momentary alignment of bright planets in a clear night sky, we saw the opening of the Winter Olympics and the Super Bowl. And the dear shade who has been speaking to me (d’outre-tombe, as the French used to say, before they became Sadducees) is the great  James V. Schall, S.J., one of the founders of this site, and author of the seminal essay “On the Seriousness of Sports.”

Thanks to the hospitality of Denise and Dennis Bartlett, our two families and the Great Schall (as we used to kid him) passed many a pleasant occasion eating, drinking, and watching sports. And for all the warmth and camaraderie, I have to confess that it’s taken me a long time to understand one of the great Jesuit’s remarks, which I encountered both in print and in person (and sometimes challenged face-to-face). As he puts it in the essay mentioned above :

the closest the average man ever gets to contemplation in the Greek sense is watching a good, significant sporting event, be it the sixth game of the World Series, the center court at Wimbledon, or the county championship of his daughter’s volley ball team.

If this doesn’t bring you up short, good for you, because Schall himself admits that it’s a  “startling theory, but one held with tenacity.”

It takes some effort to “get” this. Like many people, I like playing and watching sports of different kinds, this side idolatry. But the crass commercialization of the NFL, the gangsterism of the NBA, and the wreck of college football (and loyalty to a college itself) by the “transfer portal” and NIL payouts to “student athletes,” all present serious obstacles to the grasping of Schallian Contemplation. (The designated hitter in baseball is beneath human consideration.) But let’s look further.

He specified that he was speaking of contemplation “in the Greek sense.” So if you balk at comparing it to Christian asceticism and contemplation, you are right to. This is not that. This may even pose a serious distraction from that. So what’s the truth here?

As usual, Schall digs deep for reason and revelation:

• Plato’s Laws states that when games are played and enjoyed in a city in a regular way “the serious customs are also allowed to remain undisturbed.

• In the Politics, Aristotle sees play as « a cure for the ills we suffer in working hard, » but sports are even more helpful in that they provide time and space to do things just for their own sake.

• St. Paul, in the famous passage (1 Corinthians) is not ashamed to compare spiritual training to « fighters at the games » who run for a mere perishable wreath, while Christians strive for eternal life.

Schall observes, “Such analogies, such reflections, from such sources ought to cause us to wonder a bit about sports.”

Indeed, because sports are one of those things that have appeared in every human society, even well outside our Western tradition, often with great significance. As I learned doing a bit of research into the Mayans before Columbus, for example, several tribes had a kind of “ball game” that resembled basketball, but was regarded as a cosmic battle. (The losing team was sacrificed to the gods.) In the Popol Vuh, a kind of Mayan Bible, two ballplaying brothers, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, even exercised their sports skills so well as to become the Sun and Moon.

The seriousness, however, is not without its fun. Sports figures (not just Yogi Berra), probably because they see the quick ups and downs and sheer luck involved in games, are among the funniest people on earth. And in fact fun is a serious part of it: “What holds us spellbound for a fascinated moment must not be totally unlike what holds us fascinated forever.” (Schall)

And what is that fascination? For the fan, it’s the drama of watching highly skilled players, after years of training, attempt to do things within a framework of rules that constitute the game. Within that framework, much of human life appears: players achieve near miracles with gracefulness; others fail inexplicably; still others try to bend the rules (i.e., cheat); referees try to enforce rules – and hear about it when they don’t; seeming chance intervenes – forget not Franco Harris and the “Immaculate Reception.”

And there’s still more. Because such disinterested looking “takes us out of ourselves,” which is to say out of our everydayness, typically a good thing if it doesn’t lead down bad moral or spiritual paths. I’ve known people to walk out of a freezing stadium after a game saying, “I feel whole.” And that’s true because, at least at times, sports raises us close to the high things. Without our much trying.

Pope Leo (who seems to have brought in a new groups of writers than we had during the past dozen years) just invoked an old tradition going back to the original Olympics in Greece, asking the world to observe a truce during the games.

But Plato, who understood how important play is to life, deserves the last word, that: “What is human. . .has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that this is really the best thing about it.”

The post The Closest Thing to Contemplation appeared first on The Catholic Thing.