The Theology of Backyard Football

It is a peculiar fact, and one that modern minds might find rather startling, that watching twenty-two men battle over an oddly-shaped ball on television should remind one so forcefully of heaven. Yet there I sat during the Super Bowl, my mind wandering not to the grand spectacle before me, but to the dusty lot behind the old brick house where we neighborhood children once enacted our own miniature versions of gridiron glory. And in this wandering, I stumbled upon what might be called the great paradox of play – that in pretending to be professional athletes, we had somehow managed to be more authentically ourselves than the professionals.

The modern world, with its curious habit of making everything both more serious and less meaningful, would have us believe that there are only two ways to think about football: either as a multi-billion dollar entertainment enterprise or as a meaningless diversion. But this is precisely where the modern world reveals its characteristic blindness. For in the eyes of a child, and perhaps in the eyes of God, there is no such division between the serious and the trivial. The child knows, with a wisdom that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recover, that a thing may be both utterly important and completely unnecessary.

I remember distinctly the ritual of gathering for our neighborhood games. One of us would emerge with the football, a Christmas gift from some relative, and within minutes – as if summoned by some mystical signal – children would materialize from every direction. It was not unlike the way medieval villagers might have responded to church bells, except that our cathedral was a patch of grass and our vestments were grass-stained jeans.

There is something profoundly theological about this spontaneous assembly. The modern sociologist might explain it in terms of social networks or peer group dynamics, but I prefer to think of it as a small revelation of what the Church Fathers meant when they spoke of koinonia – that mysterious communion that draws people together not by obligation but by joy. For we did not gather because we had to, but because we could not imagine doing otherwise.

The teams were chosen with a ceremony that combined the solemnity of a papal conclave with the chaotic democracy of an Athenian assembly. Two captains would be appointed (though no one quite remembered how or by whom), and they would alternate picks until everyone was chosen. Here lies another paradox: in an age obsessed with inclusion and equality, we freely participated in a system that literally ranked us by athletic ability. Yet somehow, miraculously, no one was ever truly last. There was always some special quality that made even the least coordinated player valuable – perhaps they were particularly good at counting Mississippi's for the rush, or they knew exactly which fence post marked the end zone.

The game itself was a wonderful mixture of strict rules and creative interpretation. We played by a code that was simultaneously rigid and fluid, passed down through generations of children like an oral tradition. Certain rules were inviolable: four Mississippi's before rushing the quarterback, two complete passes for a first down, no blocking below the waist. Other rules seemed to evolve spontaneously to meet the needs of the moment: the old maple tree was out of bounds, but only if you were winning; the team with fewer players got an extra Mississippi; ghost runners were permitted if someone had to go home for dinner.

And here we arrive at perhaps the most profound paradox of all: these games, which we played in imitation of professional football, were in fact nothing like professional football. Our version was both more primitive and more sophisticated. We had no referees, yet we rarely argued about calls. We had no coaches, yet we developed complex strategies. We had no uniforms, yet we knew exactly who was on which team. We had no stadium, yet we knew precisely where the boundaries lay.

What we had, though we didn't realize it then, was a small glimpse of what might have been called the great democracy of wonder. The professional game, for all its spectacle and skill, is fundamentally about division – between players and spectators, winners and losers, the elite and the ordinary. Our game, in its fumbling way, was about unity. The child who dropped every pass was just as much a part of the game as the one who could throw a perfect spiral.

Watching the Super Bowl now, with its commercial breaks and instant replays, I find myself longing not for the professional excellence it displays, but for that simpler excellence we achieved without knowing it. For in our neighborhood games, we somehow managed to capture something that all the money and technology in the world cannot manufacture: the pure joy of play for its own sake.

This, perhaps, is why Jesus told us to become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven. Not because children are innocent (anyone who has played neighborhood football knows better), but because children understand instinctively what adults spend lifetimes trying to rediscover – that the most important things in life are the things we do for no reason at all.

Those neighborhood games ended, as all good things in this world must end. The empty lot is now a row of townhouses. The football was lost one autumn afternoon when an errant throw sent it into the storm drain. We all grew up and moved away, as children must do. But something of that communion remains, not just in memory but in reality.

For whenever I see children playing football in a backyard, or whenever I watch grown men on television playing a game for millions of dollars, I remember that patch of grass where heaven and earth met in the form of a touch football game. And I understand, with a clarity that surprises me, that what we were doing was not just playing a game but practicing for eternity. For what is heaven, after all, but the place where play and purpose become one, where the arbitrary rules we create become the eternal laws we were always meant to follow, where the temporary communities we form become the eternal communion for which we were made?

These are the thoughts that come to me during the Super Bowl, between the commercials and the instant replays. And if they seem too grandiose for such a humble subject as neighborhood football, perhaps that is only because we have forgotten how to see the eternal in the ordinary, the sacred in the simple, the divine in the game.

In the end, it may be that those neighborhood games were not just preparation for professional football, but preparation for something far more important – the great game of life itself, where the rules are mysterious but real, where everyone gets picked for a team, and where the play never really ends but only changes form. And perhaps that is why watching the Super Bowl reminds me not just of football, but of heaven.

-The Seeker’s Quill