" Go, Go, Go!" " C'mon, Get 'em" " Yes!" " No!" "Yeeeeeeessssss!!!" "Nooooooo!!! " These are only a few of the passionate cries coming from an enthusiastic family here in Memphis as we watched the basketball game on television between the Memphis Tigers and the University of Tennessee Vols. It was INTENSE! Did I say INTENSE? I mean INTENSE!!! The intensity was magnified intensely by the fact that some members of the family were cheering for Memphis while others were cheering for Tennessee. Delightful...
Besides being intense it was also beautiful. Beautiful in that a wide range of free, spontaneous, raw emotion was being felt, expressed, released, and enjoyed together. A deeply human experience...a shared community of passionate agreement and disagreement.
Flash forward or backward to your local neighborhood church, synagogue, temple and anticipate or remember your own church, synagogue, temple experience. Compare... How would you describe it? Intense? Passionate? Beautiful?
Spontaneous? Free? Deeply human? Delightful? Enthusiastic? Can it be? In our religious communities can we bounce the ball of faith with such fierce intensity back and forth , playfully, seriously,and remain committed to remaining together in the game? Maybe if we could " play" like this, our communities would be filled with passionate participants and our church , synagogue, temple experience would rise to the level of YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!!
Just wondering...
Stefan Andre
We are as the flute, and the music in us is from Thee; we are as the mountain and the echo in us is from Thee.
1 comment:
Stefan:
The fan behavior you now have experienced up close and personal can too often degrade into nastiness toward "the other" team and its fans. Even more insidious is that our identities tend to get tied up with the fortunes of "our" team. We end up identifying with our team rather than with the Kingdom of God, that we want to create in this world, as you point out in your post.
If Memphis and Tennessee were not loaded with top talent and doing so well, no one would be watching their game, they would be losers, the kind of folks that Jesus hung out with.
On the other hand, if we can keep our eyes on the big picture (in this case that sports is about building character in athletes and bringing us together in community) rather than getting hooked into whether our guy misses the front end of a 1-on-1, as it sounds like your friends were able to do, sports is a lovely experience.
Glad you are getting a taste of the wonder of sports!--Jim
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