The football season brings hundreds of thousands of people to games every year. There are training, pre-season, post-season, and the actual season. Billions of dollars are spent in marketing, sponsors, merchandise, and so on. Fans religiously attending games even if it conflicts with other obligations. It is all too easy to believe someone sneaking a peak at a game during a wedding ceremony.
Personally, I’ve never enjoyed watching the game. What I did enjoy is the fan energy; like the crowd which passionately cheers on their team. The community that surrounds football is infectious. The rivalry and competition generates a lively atmosphere. The streets are flooded with team colors. The cheers and shouts of celebrations can be heard blocks away. It’s common knowledge to expect heavy traffic around game time.
There is a mystery that a friend once asked me. He said, “How come when a football team wins the fans say ‘we won!’?” It is quite the psychological conundrum. The fans are either in the stands, outside the stadium, at a bar, or watching the game from their couch. Yet, there appears to be an ownership with the outcome of the game despite the lack of direct contact. The players on the field has a direct affect on the outcome of the game, but what affect does the fans have?
The football players can be motivated by both the boos and the cheers. A trained professional could even be immune from such influences. That is just for those present in real life. It fails to explain the countless fans cheering and booing at their TV screens miles away from the stadium.
The fans even have some superstitious practices in an effort to support the team. We must wear our lucky jersey. Some words become taboo. What starts as an coincident gets promoted to an absolute necessity. I was a victim of such superstitious thinking. One time my family was at a bar watching a sports game, I was looking away from the game and the team coincidentally scored as I looked away. This occurred two or three more times. Of course, I looked at the screen to find out what happened, but my family scolded me and said I couldn’t look at the screen anymore. I spent the rest of the game looking at my fries for the greater good of the team.
All of the superstitions and celebrations are in the name of the team. At victories, the fans explode with celebrations. “We Won!” The fans possess such a strong conviction that it puzzled my friend and got me thinking as well. The fans identify with the success and failure of the team. After pondering about it, I realized these fans offer a blueprint on how to follow Matthew 12:31, “Love others as yourself.”
Don’t confuse this commandment with the Golden Rule: Treat others the way that you want to be treated. How WE want to be treated may not be how OTHERS want to be treated. I’m confident we can find stories about married couples bemoaning how their partner doesn’t show them affection, but truly the partner is showing affection in the wrong way. The same water that softens the potato hardens the egg, as the Russian saying goes.
But to love others as yourself requires an abandonment of self to a drastic degree. We enmesh ourselves to the other person. Marriage vows mirror it well as the spouses promise that what is mine is yours. To love other as yourself is to succeed with them and to fail with them. It is a faithfulness to the relationship regardless of all oppositions or benefits. We will the good of the other person with the equivalent commitment that we pursue our self-interest.
We see fans love their teams as themselves. Fans groans at fouls. Fans cheer at scoring. Fans grow concern if there is an injury. Fans yell at refs. An attack on the team is taken personally. This commitment bleeds into the life of a fan. Their team memorabilia is found throughout their possessions. Some fans discriminate based on team affiliation; they are nicer to fellow fans than they are to rival fans. Extreme Fans almost have an obsession where their identity is impossible to separate with the team of their choice.
Imagine if we had that obsession with our fellow man. That we cheer their successes. We object to any foul play. We rearrange our schedules to make sure we give them proper attention. This type of love may come easier to our loved ones than to strangers. Some families have an intense support network where they do cheer each other on as enthusiastically as a super bowl game. We often consider those families very loving. Where as the opposite, a family which ignores each other and isolate from one another, is considered to be lacking in love.
Since the time of Moses, God dictated that we must love our neighbor as ourselves. The audacity of Christianity is that this love also applies to strangers and even to our enemies. The fans of football love their team as themselves. They laugh, cry, yell, and everything in between with their team. We Won because fans don’t see a difference between the team in the stands and their own very selves.
The Average Catholic is meant to have a similar mentality. We must be compassionate to the people we encounter. We suffer with people and laugh with people. Sharing our lives with one another is one of the greatest parts of the Christian Journey. A great community filled with love is a precursor to what awaits in Heaven. Your community could be as small as your home or as big as a super bowl stadium. Regardless, we are COMMANDED to love our neighbor as ourselves. Let’s Go team!
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