Enjoy our weeklong series leading up to the Summer Games!
Over the past 25 years, I have been asked to reflect in books, magazine articles, journals, international conferences, and at a Vatican conference about play and the grace which urges us to play. As a national team athlete, a six-time national medal-winning coach, and a PhD, the fundamental question of why we play, followed by the secondary question of why do we play to such extremes—as on the elite Olympic level—has intrigued me.
Anthropologists tell us that play is the one consistent aspect of all cultures, both historically and globally. This speaks to me of some type of universal qualities of play that is inherent in our human nature. I see these aspects as being both physical and spiritual, as, for example, in the “handedness and footedness” that we experience in the everyday, the drive to express and experience spontaneous play developing into games, and more formally into sport, to the highest limit of mind, body, soul-making, the search for that which is beyond the physical boundary—the sacred.
I think we are “hard-wired” to play in our physical makeup, and that play is anchored in the greatest social movers of human kind, i.e. the Olympic Games, the World Cup, the World Series, the Super Bowl, etc. We make heroes of people who can ride a bike fast.Why do we do it? What is it we are seeking?
The Bible has multiple references to God’s pleasure in seeing us play. Created not just to play but to play well. Our bodies improve with play because, as I’ve mentioned, we are hard-wired to do so! If we were only intended to move, then talent and getting better through hard work and practice wouldn’t be a by-product of them. Interestingly, we are created to play better and to improve! The more we execute skills the better we get at them. How? By the energy signals of neuron synapses firing over and over along neuromuscular pathways.
These pathways, encased in myelin, become the preferred pathways and the skill becomes easier, cleaner, more reliable, and more predictable. Like good insulation on wires—none of the energy signals escapes. The thicker the sheath, the cleaner, better, clearer the transmissions are. Thus, the higher the level of skill achieved, all the way to the perfected Olympic level.
What I see when I watch an Olympian playing their sport is someone pursuing perfection, a sacred development—God at work.
\ Olympians give us a window to the heights, to the heavens. The world gathers together to celebrate, not just the perfection of bodies and skills, but in a common bond, for a short period of weeks, to celebrate humanity striving to do and to be better; body, mind, spirit, and soul.
Their play carries us with them as we watch, and get a glimpse of the sacred brought to earth and that is why we are moved in our hearts as our soul connects to theirs and for a moment we play among them. And that for me is what defines something that sociologist Michael Novak calls sacred time, such as his describing a perfect pass: Though thousands of passes are thrown every year, occasionally one is executed so beautifully it is the momentary execution of perfection—akin to being in the realm of the gods as if hidden from mortal eyes and sneaked down to the earth, parting the curtains of ordinary life to see. [1]
We can’t all be Olympians, but we can all appreciate their attempts to summit the heights. Olympians unveil what play echoes to us, resonates within us, reveals God’s intention of creaturehood, to us, for us. That playing a sport, training, competing, pursuing excellence, thickening myelin, is a connection to the spiritual—calling us all, in our own ways, on whatever path we are called to be on, to strive for our higher selves. If this seems plausible to you, as it does to me, then the impetus to play is intended to help us transcend our base nature and advance humankind by the grace of God to Olympic heights.
Play matters, so play as if it matters.
[1] Novak, Michael. The Joy of Sports. P. 5. Madison Books, 1976.
