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Richard Hutch  We have all heard it said that sport is sometimes like religion. Think of the rituals involved in supporters of AFL: donning the scarves, showing up at games, fervently supporting their clubs. Watch the heat that’s created between two opposing supporters of the faithful.
Unpack the issues...
Clearly, most team sports elicit a sanctity between the players and their fans that stops time in its tracks and turns the arena into a special place. Time and space are transformed into sacred moments, sacred places. Sport lifts us out of ourselves and creates the feeling of being beyond the reach of the ordinary daily round of living. Sport is indeed an idiom of human transcendence. However, there is more to the connection between sport and faith than being lifted beyond the cares, responsibilities and worries of the daily round. If we focus on the challenge posed by sport for the individual, personal faith begins to appear on the horizon. A call to spiritual adventure is sounded. The sprinter and the cross-country runner, the lone mountain climber and the hang-glider, the scuba diver at depth and the long-distance swimmer. They are not at all caught up in the collective excitement of team sports that mimic the pomp and ceremony of high religious rites. The individual sporting person faces the possibility of success or failure alone, usually deep in the soul. In effect, an athlete puts his or her life on the line, at least as a rehearsal of personal renewal (the ‘thrill of victory’) and its polar opposite, namely physical and emotional failure (the ‘agony of defeat’). Experiences of renewal and failure in sport represent variations on the all-encompassing theme of human existence writ large: to live and be reborn while hurtling inexorably towards dying and death constitutes the sporting arena of life for all people. Does not the ‘thrill of victory’ express being very much alive and feeling reborn, literally ‘born again?’ Does not the ‘agony of defeat’ raise the spectre of dying and death, a ‘dark night of the soul,’ if ever there was one? Faith is honed between these polar opposites in the lived experience of sport. Faith, like life, is more than just a destination; it is a journey of a life-time. Sport invites activity that presses the edges of what it means to be human: it gives rise to faith in one’s possibilities in the light of one’s limitations. The fine line in between continually clarifies from event to event, challenge to challenge. Knowing when to rejoice is one thing, but wisely knowing when to give up trying is another. Such is the journey of faith. It is the grist of human spiritual life. Sport, in the life of the individual, becomes a person’s ‘religious affiliation,’ so to speak. Being Buddhist, Christian, Muslim or any other kind of religious practitioner is, from this point of view, somewhat beside the point. When it comes to the grandest of all sporting events, the Olympics, if we turn from the outward spectacle to the players themselves, the drama takes on a very personal turn. If an athlete seeks a horizon of personal achievement that goes beyond a personal best or peak performance, then this is likely to engage his or her awareness in making parallel connections between sport and spirituality. As we avidly watch the Olympics, we could well ask whether there is more at stake in the sporting contest than meets the eye. Do some athletes actually use their athletic performance as an existential challenge, or a means to higher spiritual awareness of their possibilities and limitations? Might sport really be a way of rehearsing reckonings with death? We must admit that the prospect of sport as spiritual practice is compelling. Faith is born of linking together human possibilities and limitations, and growing increasingly aware of such connections. Over time, what accrues from sustaining these self-conscious connections is human spirituality. The so-called ‘religious life’ need not have much to do with confessing one’s faith as determined by a particular world religion, though it may. Perhaps a spiritual witness in our secular times could be fostering the religious life in other ways; sport can be an occasion for enhancing a life of faith. Sport is able to increase spiritual awareness. Existence is structured fundamentally by a contest between our experiences of renewal and failure combined, and our desire to address this tension from moment to moment. Great religious leaders have shown us how to address the tension between renewal and failure in all experience, especially when personal stakes are high: Jesus ‘played the game’ of reckoning with mortality and went to his cross a failure. However, the cross itself has become a source of Christian renewal. The Buddha also ‘played the game’ of coming to grips with his failure to find contentment and happiness. Only when he gave up his quest for these things and embraced suffering as the intractable nature of existence did he, paradoxically, find spiritual renewal in enlightenment. And Muhammad ‘played the game’, after being anguished by self-doubt he then found spiritual renewal through submitting his life selflessly to his god, ‘Allah’. We might well ask, like those spiritual seekers who have gone before us, can we too follow their leads? Our existence is a shared one that transcends time and space. So, we most certainly can do as much as they did to convert failure into renewal each day. We most certainly can play the game of life as we explore sport; as we seek signals of spirituality within sporting activities; and as we then think hard about the nature and purpose of being alive in the arena of life, especially as the 2008 Olympics get underway. Sport gives rise to faith, and faith makes sport a powerful spiritual practice.
Richard Hutch is Reader and Head of the School of History, Philosophy, Religion & Classics at the University of Queensland. He has researched and written extensively in the area of Religion and Psychological Studies and, since 2005, has turned his thought to the emerging academic area of Sport and Spirituality. His recent work includes publications on solo-sailing, recreational motorcycling and scuba diving.
Unpack the issues...Discussion points - To what extent is there a relationship between sport and religious faith?
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Being born again is about repentance and new life, however the exhilaration from the process can be a great feeling and may feel like victory, and it can never be allied to the human experience of victory and success. His view of these things is very much influenced by Plato; current culture and not Christ.