There are many (me included) who feel football has become America's preeminent "natural religion" and with
the playing today of the Super Bowl it brings to an end the high holy season of the sport.
Even the Roman numerals give it a semi-sanctified status.
If you haven't figured it out by now, the Super Bowl isn't just a football game. Like the ancient Olympics in Greece, the Super Bowl has some of the trappings of a religious festival.
Consider:
Thousands of fans fill one of the NFL's "temples"; this year it's Ford Field in Detroit. Millions of others gather in homes with friends to share in the secular equivalent of sacramental eating and drinking as they watch the event.
The "saints" of the sport, both current and past players, are celebrated in ceremonies at the stadium. "Congregations" of faithful fans in homes, sports bars and other sites around the country offer their "amen" hoo-hahs.
Many of the players acknowledge their dependence on a higher power as they prepare to take the field, as well as during the game. Shaun Alexander, Seattle Seahawks star running back, already has offered a pregame invocation when he said "prayer works." The reference was to his being knocked out in a game leading up to the Super Bowl and having others step up to carry the load. God's intervention, it seems, surely must mean that the Seahawks are favored over the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Pageantry at halftime -- often with nationalistic elements and religious overtones -- is the blest tie that binds all who sit before the television "altar," even if they don't like the game.
Of course fans, like religious folk, can be fickle. Unless the score is close in the fourth quarter, expect more and more viewers to change the channel or turn off their TVs altogether.
Only the true believers will remain till the game's benediction: the awarding of the Lombardi championship trophy by the NFL's "high priest": commissioner Paul Tagliabue.
Related article worth checking out: Super Bowl: Now, let us play
Michael Novak wrote what I believe is a materpiece of a book about the mystical union that exsists between sport and the spiritual. It's called... The Joy of Sports and I reccommend it to anyone interested in exploring the spiritual side of sports.
Here's a favorite quote of mine from the book that fits today's Holy Event.
Sports are religious in the sense that they are organized institutions, disciplines, and liturgies; and also in the sense that they teach religious qualities of heart and soul. In particular, they recreate symbols of cosmic struggle, in which human survival and moral courage are not assured. To this extent, they are not mere games, diversions, pastimes. Their power to exhilarate or depress is far greater than that. To say "It's only a game" is the psyche's best defense against the cosmic symbolic meaning of sports events.
...To lose symbolizes death, and it certainly feels like dying; but it's not death. The same is true of religious symbols like baptism or the Eucharist; in both, the communicants experience death, symbolocally, and are reborn, symboloically.
If you give your heart to the ritual, it's effects upon your inner life can be far-reaching.
There is another quite different event taking place today that makes this day even more directly spiritual... and it all started back in 1988 with a prayer said by Rev. Brad Smith.
'Lord, even as we enjoy the Super Bowl football game, help us be mindful of those who are without a bowl of soup to eat.'
That simple prayer has led to today possibly being the largest day of giving in America...
it's also SOUPER BOWL Sunday today.
Please give if you can.
(as posted at Cristo Lumen)