Three Things Common to Organized Religion and Organized Sports
You Make The Culture by Jackie Henrion
Some years ago, I made a quiet vow to stop labeling things as “good” or “bad.” Life unfolds more tenderly when you stop stamping it with verdicts. Contemplative philosophy teaches us to simply greet what arrives, as if each moment is a stranger at the door, "Well, it's been quite a while” like Ann Murray's folk lyric murmurs, “But you can still light the room with your smile.”
I may not judge, but I still observe. And the culture, the way we create and behave in our enthusiasm, always gives us plenty to notice.
Lately, as the holidays take shape in the U.S., the collective vibration lifts, buzzier, brighter, and more frantic. I slip out for one simple errand and suddenly find myself swept into the Black Friday riptide: flash sales, panic carts, the strange trance of scarcity. A buzzing chorus beneath all the noise seems to hum Dave Carter's spirited, I Go Like The Raven, "Set my dancin' feet to fly,” though I’m not sure anyone knows where that Raven is headed or why we’re all hurtling with it.
“Holiday,” long before it became a commerce engine, meant holy day. Communing. Gathering. Hands around a table. Soft voices around a candle. Now it’s more often a scramble, screens filled with games and ads competing for our devotion like neon-lit chapels. And so, in that swirl, I found myself wondering: What do organized religion and organized sports, two of our most passionately defended systems, actually share? Three common threads rose like the refrain of a familiar song.
1. The Concentration of Power (or Energy, depending on your metaphysics)
Both institutions were built to gather, channel, and direct human energy. At their origins, you’ll find leaders who understood this alchemy; priests, rabbis, commissioners, owners, and marketeers. People who knew that attention is a currency stronger than gold.
Put enough bodies into a sanctuary or a stadium, and the air begins to shimmer. We call it spirit in one place, team pride in another, but the hum is the same. It’s that chorus rising in unison, like the line from MaMuse's song, “Hallelujah, I'm gonna let myself be lifted,” only here, the wings are collective emotion.
Someone stands at the front, a pulpit, a sideline, and all eyes turn in one shared direction. Where attention goes, power flows. And our culture is fluent in gathering both.
2. The Tribalism of “In vs. Out”
Every congregation has its doctrine. Every team has its rival. This binary impulse, this need for belonging by contrast runs deep in the human psyche. This sorting is ancient to us; the saved and the unsaved, the home team and the visitors. or more perversely, the citizens and the immigrants. The jerseys change, but the psychology does not.
Yet contemplative practice softens these edges, the way watercolor softens at the rim of the page. It reminds us that identity isn’t armor, it’s a cloak we can lift on and off. Eventually some realize it's a cloak of our own imagination.
Still, we chant our team colors, because it feels like fun. We recite our sacred lines, because it feels meaningful. We draw boundary after boundary in the sand, though the next wind will move them all. A lyric from Dar William's Family drifts through my mind here: "Different people with a common pain,” reminding me that every tribe is temporary, and every stranger is kin not yet recognized.
3. Distraction From Personal Experience
Here lies the tender one. Both organized religion and organized sports can become magnificent distractions. Beautiful, stirring, communal, yes, but distractions nonetheless, from one’s own direct experience of being alive. We feel the emotions projected from a stage, a sermon, a stadium, a scoreboard, even a TV commercial, instead of feeling the quiet pulse of our own life. One might say; Spectatorship replaces presence, technique replaces intimacy, noise replaces noticing.
And during the holidays, everything seems amplified; the ads, the games, the gatherings, the pressure. It becomes even harder to hear the subtle music inside ourselves.
The music that says, “Don't hold us back, we're the story you tell.” The music that says, “this land was made for you and me,” not as a patriotic claim, but as a reminder that the ground you are standing on, right now, is enough.
A Closing Thought
I don’t write this as critique. I write it as invitation.To notice. To soften. To step a little outside the spectacle so you can hear your own breath again. To choose communion over consumption, and presence over the frenetic choreography of the season.
Culture is not something done to us. Culture is something we braid together, one choice, one moment, and one small act of awareness at a time.
Like Dar William's lyric whispers in her song The Weight of the World,
"So go on just let it out
It's the weight of the world,
if you ever had a doubt."
But the miracle is you don’t have to carry it blindly or alone, because it
"Was never yours to keep."