Nowhere to Hide: The Awful Clarity of Sports

Sports, art and religion, all ingenious human inventions,  have many things in  common–discipline, sacrifice, devotion, beauty,  redemption, and more. In many ways they improve upon mere life itself, hence their lasting appeal. They offer answers for our fumbling, incomplete lives. They tantalize us with the greatest illusion of all, the belief that we can attain physical, moral, aesthetic or intellectual perfection, and that  will give us some kind of immortality.

But the pursuit of perfection carries with it great danger, as we saw last night at the Olympics. The  American gymnast Alicia  Sacramone, who really is 20 years old,  made mistakes that cost her team the gold medal. We all make mistakes every day–it’s early, and I’ve already made a few–but most come before very small audiences or no audience at all. Hers came in front of countless millions of people.

 “No one else made mistakes, so it’s kind of my fault,” Sacramone said, still trying to blink back the tears from her red-rimmed eyes. “I think everybody knows you always have good days and bad days. I just wish today was a good day.”

That’s a large burden to live with at any age. But it’s always that way in sports. Here’s the great baseball writer Roger Angell, from his classic The Summer Game:

“It all looks easy, slow, and above all, safe. Yet we know better, for what is certain in baseball is that someone, perhaps several people, will fail. They will be searched out, caught in the open, and defeated, and there will be no confusion about it or sharing of the blame. This is sure to happen, because what baseball [and all sports] requires of its athletes, of course, is nothing less than perfection, and perfection cannot be eased or divided.”

Let’s applaud  Sacramone and the others who dare  to reach for perfection.  I hope she has many, many better days ahead.*

 

*I also hope she’s not reading comments like this one from the Dallas Morning News sports-fan blog:

You have single-handedly brought disgrace and dishonor to this country. You should be ashamed of yourself, as this country is ashamed of your performance and regrets selecting you to represent us on the world stage.

I’m sure this fellow scales great heights in his job each day.

 

 

 

 

Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Orwell

The poignant revelations that Mother Teresa spent years in spiritual aridity, questioning God’s love and God’s existence, have been greeted with a spectrum of responses. For some, the news seems to have shaken their faith, while some who are not just irreligious but anti-religious seem almost gleeful to know that one of the most famous “God Squad” members was at best a phony, at worst a hypocrite.

I never paid much attention to Mother Teresa while she was alive except to note that whatever her beliefs, the starving, wretched people she served  needed all the help they could get;  soup is soup whether it comes from believers in God or believers in Sherlock Holmes.

Strangely enough, though,  these revelations actually make me feel a bit closer to her.It’s hard to feel much in common with a saint-in-waiting. Her whole existence was devoted to nurturing others, while I feel pretty magnanimous taking  a bag of old t-shirts to the Salvation Army. To know that she struggled with doubt and questioned life’s purpose makes her seem more like one of us, I suppose.

If you’d like to read a great essay about another “saintly” leader, and the difficulties we ordinary mortals can have in understanding them, check George Orwell’s classic “Reflections on Gandhi.” You’ll find it here.

3…4…5…Okay, You Can Take Off the Veil Now

I can’t agree with acerbic author Christopher Hitchens that religion “poisons” everything. Once in a while, some pretty good chuckles can be found in the world of the faithful.

Take the recent story of the breastfeeding fatwa issued by a Muslim lecturer at an Egyptian university. Apparently, the teachings of Mohammed, which we will not illustrate here with a cartoon, forbid unmarried men and women from working together.

So what to do? The lecturer came up with this idea, drawing on Muslim teachings: If the woman would symbolically breastfeed the men five times (symbolically, I guess, if she wasn’t lactating), that would make everything hunky-dory. Here’s a quote from the Reuters article:

“. . . after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.”

Okay…after not one, or two, but five  breastfeedings…Gotcha.

For some reason, this reminds me  of the old joke about the Baptist minister having the torrid affair with a member of his church. They meet at her house. They rip off their clothes and rush together. Then he notices they’re standing near a large picture window.

“For God’s sake, get down!” he screams. “Someone might think we’re dancing!”

Anyway, here’s more if you’d like to keep abreast of the story.