Hardly the Last Word

The Roar of the Crowd – ChronicleReview.com.

I would normally start out a reflection on an article like this with an admission that I’m just as avid a sports fan as the next guy, but then I have to remember that, save a couple times when I’ve been up in Indiana with my brother or my dad, I’ve not watched a sporting event from start to finish for a couple years now.? I read about the Cubs and the Colts on the Internet, and I occasionally look in our newspaper’s sports page to make sure the Pacers still have the worst record in basketball this season, but that’s about it.? I know full well that my sabbatical from spectator sports has mainly been a function of being so busy that something had to give, but now that I think about it, I might just keep being a newspaper sports person when I get myself down to one job.

At any rate, the article’s author, a psychologist, makes some psycho-biological attempts at explaining why people get so fired up to watch other adults play children’s games, but those weren’t the most interesting parts of the article.? The bit that got my attention was this understated but nonetheless poignant indictment of this part of the entertainment industry:

Youngsters seem especially prone to that delusion, desperate as they are for heroes, and craving the opportunity to bask in another’s glory. And so when children avidly pore over vacuous images and vital statistics, or traipse enthusiastically to the local (or even distant) stadium, it is easy to make allowances. Indeed, there is something touching about such fresh-faced yearning for exemplars, even though the constellations they see may not be notable for the content of their characters, intelligence, compassion, decency, or creativity, but rather for an uncommon and sometimes downright freakish ability to hit, throw, catch, roll, or bounce a ball, to jump high or punch hard, or to bump into other people in such a manner as to knock them down and/or avoid being knocked down themselves. Small wonder everyone ends up disappointed when those luminaries are revealed to be moral dwarfs.

And here’s where the part of my soul that’s Catholic wants to stand up and cheer.? I know the standard Protestant-flavored objection to this: nobody’s perfect, so we shouldn’t expect professional athletes (and those athletes that play for professional sports-entertainment franchises but get no money for it) to be any different.? The Protestant ethos, it seems, is averse to setting up any fallible human being as an exemplar in a fallen world.? But even as an incorrigible Protestant myself, I want to say that there are Saints in the world, folks whose ways of existing in the world are different enough, and in good ways, that the rest of us should pay attention when we run into one and whose stories, by sheer force of example, stand to make us better at existing in the world.

The problem, of course, is that saints’ lives, with the exceptions of the sexy martyr stories that critical theorists get so excited about, don’t make good television.? They don’t generate highlight reels so much as long narratives that require some modicum of patience to hear and imitate.? I’m not going to get bent out of shape if Micah’s grandparents want him to wear Colts and Steelers gear; that’s not my point at all.? But I do hope that, by my own faithful storytelling, I can get him to realize that sacks and touchdowns aren’t the stuff of the best kind of human life.? I always pray for God to make of me a saint, but until that happens, I hope that I can tell the stories of Francis and Augustine and John of the Cross well enough that “Big Ben” and “The Bus” aren’t the borders of my son’s imagination.

by ngilmour