For the sports fan, recent months have been the source of much activity: the Olympics, the NHL and NBA finals, the opening of the major league baseball season, the opening of a new PGA tour season, the re-entry of Ottawa into the CFL, and, last but not least, my grandchildren (ages seven to thirteen) playing in their final hockey tournaments for the year. All this sports activity makes a jock like me, who is also a Christian, try to justify the time he spends watching, discussing, and attending sports events. 

Indeed, the sports experience has taken over much of the lives of many people. Consider the thousands for whom Hockey Night in Canada, or Saturday or Sunday or Monday night football in Canada and the United States is the highlight of the week - the way church attendance used to be for them - while now churches are half empty, and the number of Masses and other Sunday services have been reduced. Many of the people who attended these services now spend their time attending or watching football or baseball or hockey or basketball or- in a European context - soccer games. The enthusiasm and commitment they once showed at religious services are now spent on sporting events. 

So I ask myself: Is there a religious significance in these sporting events that is not always appreciated by those who regret the loss in popularity of overtly religious events? Can there be some religious meaning in sports for me, and for all the other jocks out there?

As I reflect on these questions, I recall the comparisons St. Paul drew between athletic events and the life of the Christian. He did this on many occasions, as in Romans 9:30, Philipians 3:12, 1 Timothy 6:11-12. Even Hebrews 12:1-2 compares the spiritual life to the runner and the race.

The most detailed comparison in Paul between sports and spirituality is found in 1 Corinthians 23-27, which contains these salient lines: “You know well enough that when men run in a race, the race is for all, but the prize for one; run, then, for victory. Every athlete must keep all his appetites under control; and he does it to win a crown that fades, whereas ours is imperishable” (vv. 24-25).

Paul obviously sees value in comparing the struggle of the Christian to the efforts of an athlete in a competition. And I suggest that Christians today, and not only jocks, can benefit from seeing their spiritual lives in terms of the sports they are attracted to. 

True fans get caught up in the destiny of a team or of certain players for any given year, or for many years. They support their team whatever their record may be; they support it in good times and bad, when they are on a roll and when they are in a slump; their moods rise and fall with the fate of their team and with the performance of its players and coaches, though they may criticize both, and berate the team when it fails to meet their expectations. When they support a consistent loser, they rejoice even in the few victories it manages in the course of a season. And when it wins a league championship such as a Stanley Cup or a Grey Cup or a World Series or a Superbowl their feelings of joy and fulfillment know no bounds. Those who support losers often know the depths of despair.

It is good for Christian jocks to know that the same feelings of loss and discouragement and frustration and joy and ecstasy are part of their  lives as Christians, and indeed of every life. 
Swings of mood are so much a part of the spiritual life that one can forget that defeat is followed by victory, and despair by exultation. And even in long periods of drought, the Christian knows - with more certainty than any sports fan - that the crown they are seeking is a certain and imperishable one. 

What Christians can especially learn from the sporting life is the value of commitment to a cause. The true jock so identifies with the fortunes of their team that they can in no way disengage from its up-and-downs. And even if the team loses the championship yet another time, the true believer returns committed and invigorated when the next season begins, hoping - sometimes against hope - that this will be “their year”. As the Epistle to the Hebrews 11:1 says in another context, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen “ . For the true fan, faith and hope are sometimes all they have. Here again, the true Christian can learn from the jock. 

The danger, of course, is that for the sports enthusiast, sport itself can become a religion, as it has for many people obsessed with their favourite team, or with sports in general. You can hear these people on the many talk shows on the 24-hour sports radio stations across North America. For them the lines between sports and religion can become so blurred that sport itself takes over as the all-encompassing reality that gives meaning to everything else in life, rather than the other way around. At this stage, sport has ceased to throw light on the practice of religion, and has become an end in itself. 

But given this caveat, sport can be a beacon for those who would follow the light of Christ, just as it was for Paul in many instances, and for the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
It may even help a jock like me become a better Christian - just as music or art or literature or philosophy or science or architecture may light the way for us all. 

With these reflections I feel more justified in enthusiastically supporting my Ottawa Senators as they play once again in the first round of the finals of Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League, strong in the hope that maybe this year they will survive the first round and go on, sometime in June, to meet the winners of the Western Conference for the Stanley Cup. At the least (or perhaps the most), I am solaced by the thought that whether they win or lose, the experience will be grist for the mill that is my spiritual life.