This winter brought the unexpected intersection of Henri Nouwen and Super Bowl Sunday into my life—a great spiritual force making an appearance during a weekend when tired winter existence was about to become bedazzled by whatever would occur between strong teams from the gritty towns of Green Bay and Pittsburgh. An incredible coincidence that Nouwen's words reflected upon sports, too—but only after he had made some important spiritual points about holy monks who had lived long ago in the arid and empty desert. Being alone without even the stimulation of a rainstorm or the morning dew meant that these holy persons had to develop the capacity to be anchored when surrounded by inner floods of human emotion:
My reading about the spirituality of the desert has made me aware of the importance of 'nepsis.' Nepsis means mental sobriety, spiritual attention directed to God, watchfulness in keeping the bad thoughts away, and creating free space for prayer. While working with the rocks I repeated a few times the famous words of the old desert fathers: "fuge, tace, et quiesce" (live in solitude, silence, and inner peace..." (Nouwen, writing in The Genesee Diary.)
Nouwen's reflections about what it meant to be a monk in the desert are about as far away as one can get from Super Bowl excitement and the vast chasm can be seen when reading Nouwen's words and then contrasting them with Erick Torbenson's New York Post description of the cultural meaning of big-time football:
Pro baseball and basketball lie concussed, unable to get a make on the league that has blitzed their television ratings, sacked all the sponsorship bucks and driven deep into a nation's sporting red zone.
Fresh off its best television ratings in 15 years, the NFL is something more than pigskin and pomp. It's the cultural reference point that goes beyond income, politics, and all the other stuff that's dividing the country.
In a world where politics are so divisive that people can't hold a rational conversation, where the economy has roughed up budgets and split us all into winners and losers, maybe the new tentpole that lets us gather and drop the labels is a football game and a big spread on Sunday.
Nouwen discovered spiritual meaning when contrasting the those ancient desert monks with the sport of bullfighting in Spain and I think the same spiritual lesson can be made using Super Bowl Sunday as the focus. Both are violent sports and the grandstand mobs waiting to see the sprawl have been greatly magnified by television and wide screen televisions. While one might declare that football is less violent than bullfighting (cruelty and death to bulls is duly noted). Yet the ambulances lined up at the edge of high school football fields across the USA, deaths from heat exhaustion on playing fields, closed-head concussive injuries more crippling than bleeding side wounds, and emerging tallies of permanent brain damage in old football players—all of these make some of us wonder what is going on here. Again, Nouwen:
Or I'll Dress You in the Morning is a book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapiere. This is a book about the Spanish bullfighter Manuel Benitez, 'El Cordobez' who from a poor Andalasian boy soon becomes one of the greatest Spanish heroes of today. On the evening of his first bullfight, he said to his sister who opposed his plans, 'Don't cry, Angelita. Tonight I'll buy you a house or I'll dress you in mourning.' I looked for a long time at his picture in the book. The enormous tensions of his courageous bullfights have made his face heavy, serious, and very sad. How will his life end? Since the beginning of the bullfights in their present form, more than four hundred torreros have been killed by bull's horns. I am very curious to hear the whole story. What is it that makes us so full of desires to make a man risk his life? One answer is: Lack of nepsis.
William Van Ornum
When will we move beyond the Democrats Vs Republicans great divide and create something new, a new party that will be more of the people and less of the rich and powerful, beyond the oligarchy that rules the USA?
PS I am an American!
Your comment is as dead on and enjoyably witty as any post I've read in weeks. Thank you for making reading these blogs worth my time (not a usual happenstance).
Perhaps someone would like to address this? It is an issue that seems, at least to me, to raise some unsettling questions, and deserves a bit of thinking in a forum that has often examined anger, violence, and war in other blogs and articles. Or are the many injuries in football, as they might say in the military, "collateral damage" that just have to be accepted as a co-occurrence of our enjoyment?
bill
Thanks!
bill
What is it that makes us so full of desires to make a man risk his life? This article is an interesting one and definitely made me think about the answer to the question. Lack of nepsis is a good reasoning, because it is true, no matter which dangerous sport we love to watch professional players take part in, we root them on, want them to play harder and rougher, and we love it. Nepsis may be defined in multiple ways, but when it comes to the SuperBowl, the beginning of the game, "Star Spangled Banner" and "National Anthem", are sang by some of the most highly talented singers, which puts the whole crowd, and television watchers everywhere into a state of religious mind. Those first ten minutes are heartfelt, as the cameras scroll down the line and show football players tearing up at the thought of honoring God and our country.
It is hard to depict why exactly humans like the gore, danger, and fights that go on in sports and even everyday life. Football isn't exactly like bull riding, which I feel is a lot more dangerous, but these people who engage in these sports love the feeling of anxiousness and danger. Danger excites people, life wouldn't be fun without challenges and games with unknown outcomes. The SuperBowl is like a holiday in itself. Sports fans live for the game, cheer their faces off, socialize with friends, gamble on endless amounts of money, all because they have faith in one team, and it's simply exciting to place a bet in chances of either winning or loosing it all. Much of this doesn't make the most sense for some, but football fans, like myself and most of the general public love the adrenaline rush. Players play with padding and are as safe as possible. Their are rules of the game that aren't meant to be broken, and when they are there is penalty. The risk of injury, sometimes even death in the worst cases,
I'm more concerned about the youngsters involved in Pop Warner and later in high school and college football. As Crystal and Marie said, sports do have very positive aspects in building skills in teamwork and bodily strength and agility. These positives fall by the wayside when children are exposed to a sport that can cause them permenant injury. Where are the parents in all this?? As other parents have done (eg parents of mentally retarded children) they need to band together and make demands on those who are in charge of Pop Warner, high school principals and college administrators and alumnae.
p.s. That is a great picture of Henri Nouwen! He is one of my favorite contemporary,, not yet canonized saints. Thanks for bringing his thoughts into a discussion of football. AMDG Janice
It is known that men try to impress women through their strength and this is one way of doing that. Football allows men to take out their aggression in a controlled setting as Crystal mentioned above. I would rather men take out their aggressive tendencies in a controlled environment than out on their families or on strangers. Sports is a way for men who have lost their way to find a passion and break way from their past. Many men are given a second chance through playing football. A prime example is Michael Oher of the Baltimore Ravens. He was the main character in the movie the ''Blindside.'' He was one of 12 children born to a drug and alcohol dependent mother and a frequently incarcerated father. Football was his way out of poverty and his saving grace. This can be paralleled to the church because many people find strength in God, sometimes when they have lost faith in other aspects of their life. Thus, football like religion gives people hope and the strength to carry on.