It’s become common in secular society in the past decade for observers, like me, to highlight the strong link between sports and religion.
That connection is even more pronounced with the Olympics, which originated in ancient Greece as a decidedly sacred series of events.
Still, the argument connecting sports to a civil religion has been largely based on external similarities. Thinkers note that sports, like religion, has ritual, builds community, provides purpose, has codes of ethics and requires faith (in one’s favorite team or the potential for victory).
“Sports resemble narrative art, myth and religious ritual. That is, they require that one give oneself over to a story in which the elements of human experience are distilled, displayed and integrated into a pattern of meaning that stirs the heart and quickens the soul,” writes Andrew Cooper in Playing in the Zone.
But what happens in sports at an even more intimate and individual level? What is the inner link between sports and spirituality?
Reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow.
these parallels aren’t really that interesting. Most of us have all kinds of “rituals,” morning rituals, work rituals, shopping rituals, family rituals. If ritual and community are the essentials that describe religion, then what isn’t religious?
What defines the religious dimension is not simply ethics, community and ritual, but the divine, the transcendent and the eternal.
I would add that the confusion about what is religious and what is not has come from liberal religion which has reduced itself to the sociological aspects of religion. Catholicism imbibed a good chunk of this reductionism at Vatican II and is now recovering slowly from this tripe.