I’ve blogged in the past about Wife Lorna’s magical effect on the fortunes of my team, the New England Patriots. And I’ve also blogged on Super Christian Tim Tebow’s magical effect on the fortunes of his team, the Denver Broncos. And although Lorna has never gone so far as to paint Biblical scripture under her beautiful eyes as Tebow has on numerous occasions, this weekend could come down to a case of mana vs. mana, as the Pats play the Broncos, possibly pitting Lorna’s magical power of eternal optimism against Tebow’s magical power of undying faith in Jesus.
Many years ago when Lorna first got into her public speaking business, she adopted as a motivational tool for herself the posting of a picture of a dream house. This would be the house she would buy if she ever made it big. I was always amused by this, although I must admit my amusement would have been seriously tempered if she had hung a crucifix over her computer. Or a Star of David. Or if she had put a prayer rug on the floor and bowed to Mecca three times a day. But really--aside from personal prejudice or preference--is any of it any different?
Humans have been drawn to totems and talismans and rituals since the beginning of our recorded history. For almost 20 years I cheered for two ballplayers—Wade Boggs and Nomar Garciappara—who were practically Haitian in their devotion to some kind of voodoo to up their game. Boggs had to eat chicken and step over the baseline at the exact same time before every game. And watching Garciapparra get ready for an at bat was like watching a whirling Dervish with Parkinson’s. Are Tebow’s extravagant exhibitions of reverence any more odd or annoying?
Liberal that I am, I haven’t devoted myself entirely to opinion on this subject that simply reinforces my own--that being that Tebow’s ostentatious displays of faith mark the new nadir in public displays of piety that have been insidiously and relentlessly creeping into our society via sports and politics, paving the way for the theocratic makeover of America so zealously desired by a determined, organized, massively aggrieved and aggressive cult of Christian fundamentalists. I really have paid attention to other voices admonishing us not to take this Tebow phenomenon so damned seriously. The most recent—and reasonable—voice I heard raised in this regard was in Salon. It was in a piece by Andrew Leonard and aptly titled "Hallelujah! The liberal case for Tim Tebow" (I say aptly because finding the liberal case for Tim Tebow on Salon is exactly what you’d expect to find on a liberal website like that…kind of like finding a Mormon Republican elected governor of liberal Massachusetts. These are acts of liberalism that you will not find repeated if, say, a Catholic Democrat ran for governor of Utah or an apostate wrote the liberal case against Tim Tebow for some rightwing blog like Townhall.com.)
Leonard writes:
And then there’s the take of Chuck Klosterman [who] argues that Tebow is discomfiting because “he makes blind faith a viable option.” His faith in God, his followers’ faith in him — it all defies modernity. This is why people care so much. He is making people wonder if they should try to believe things they don’t actually believe. In other words we don’t hate Tebow because he has faith, we hate him because we’re afraid his won-loss record might convert us. That’s scary!
Scary may be overstating it. I prefer discomfiting. Like Tebow, who has had a lifetime of extraordinary success, Lorna has had enormous success in her chosen field, and eventually managed to buy a house that was even better than the one she used to motivate herself all those many years ago. Fortunately, for my peace of mind, I was able to watch up close the extraordinary amount of work that went into making that possible, so I never had to seriously consider the unsettling possibility that the talismanic dream house hanging over her computer was entirely responsible.
Still I cannot deny that Lorna’s preternatural optimism has played a large part in her success. And (for want of a better expression) I’ll give the devil his due and admit that Tebow’s faith has clearly had a lot to do with his inordinate success. But neither optimism nor faith is a comfortable fit for the rational, secular mind, which prefers to wallow in the hard, cold facts of life. I happen to be cursed with such a mind.
It wasn’t always so. Until the age of 19 I was possessed of a faith that would have bowed Tebow over. Holy Communion every Sunday. Church every night. Talks with Jesus almost hourly. And I cranked it all up to a fare-thee-well in my freshman year of college when I had to achieve a B average to maintain a 4-year scholarship but was doing poorly in Spanish. (O Dios mio.) Frankly I should have been spending far more time in the language lab at night than I was spending in church. In relying more on prayer than study, I lost the scholarship. I was like the little kid in that joke who prays for a bike for Christmas and when it doesn’t come cries to his father, “I prayed to Him every night for a new bike, but God didn't answer my prayers.”
“Sure, he did,” replies the dad, “He said ‘no.’”
Whether subsequent events would have disabused me of this childish notion that all you had to do was be good and pray and all will be right with your world, I can only hope. But that was it for me—my loss of spiritual innocence. And over time I matured into a devout believer in The Great God Irony. I even gave him a name--Spinelli--and a back-story and wrote a play about Him. And I'm here to tell you quite honestly that I see evidence of Spinelli's existence nearly every day. The most tragic and painful episode in my entire life is drenched in Irony--as are some of the most beautiful and significant.
As, too, are some of the most banal--which brings us back to football. In one of the most famous upsets in the history of American sports the lowly underdog New York Giants upset my mighty, undefeated Patriots in Super Bowl XLII. In the closing two minutes of that game, Spinelli virtually took over. First, Pats cornerback Asante Samuel, leading the league in interceptions, let a sure interception go through his hands, which would have clinched the win and the Pats place in NFL history as the greatest team of all time. Next, Giants quarterback Eli Manning uncharacteristically kept his cool and shook off numerous Patriot tacklers to break free and throw a do-or-die third-and-long pass. And finally, a virtually unknown receiver made the most improbable catch of that pass with one hand holding the ball against his helmet while being slammed to the ground by Patriot safety Rodney Harrison who had made a career of separating receivers from balls firmly clutched in their two hands.
Amazingly, I've been able to take odd comfort in that loss because I find in it confirmation of my view that Irony rules. And I can see how the circumstances of that Giants’ victory, so similar to the recent Tebow-driven Bronco victories, might confirm opposing metaphysical views of how the world works. In other words, if you were Tim Tebow or a fan of Tim Tebow, inclined to the view that faith in Jesus works, this string of victories he’s been on lately might be all the proof you’d need that you’re right in your belief. And to be as ecumenical as possible, ever since that Patriots’ loss, Greg Easterbrook at ESPN.com has proclaimed loud and long that the Patriots’ loss in that game was karma for their having been caught cheating earlier in the season.
Irony. Jesus. Karma. What we’re talking about here of course is the influence of utterly unscientific forces on our lives. Even the most rational among us seem vulnerable to such magical thinking. Those Masters of the Universe on Wall Street, for instance, who worship at the altar of The Bottom Line, have a fervent faith in something they call the rationality of the marketplace. But recent studies have exposed that as a mythical creation of unicorn-conforming cuteness.
“Much of modern economic and financial theory is based on the assumption that people are rational, and thus that they systematically maximize their own happiness, or as economists call it, their “utility”…[but]…generations of economists have based their research not on any physical structure underlying thought and behavior, but only on the assumption of rationality.”
So, too, our most cold-blooded brethren engage in magical thinking of a sort. As
Howard Zehr says of convicted felons in his study of our failed justice system:
“If success comes, it is associated more with luck than hard work. If they are arrested for an offense, it has more to do with luck than something they did. Whether or not they do have the power to make real choices, many do not believe that they do.”
As a species we seem to need magical thinking to explain the precariousness of our existence and impose the illusion of control over our fate. “Whatever gets you through the night,” quoth the Eggman, and I’m a total Lennonist on that score. But sometimes our individual magical thoughts lead to unmagical consequences for others. The criminal who believes bad luck has led him to rob your house. The stockbroker who believes the rational marketplace will restore the risky investments he made in your name. The religious fundamentalists who believe that the world will be saved if we would all just believe exactly as they do.
Even my faith in Irony—a pretty sophisticated, nonintrusive belief system, if I do say so myself—has its darkside. When you go through life believing that death is just a punch line to all earnest human effort, you risk not investing in the people and things around you as heavily as you could…or maybe should.
But now if you'll excuse me, I must don my ironic detachment in preparation for this Sunday's game. And if Tebow's faith should trump my faith--if his Jesus should break my Spinelli's tackle and plunge into the end zone with the winning score at the final second--I will, as I often do in harsh times, turn to my personal bible, Love's Body. No doubt I will find comfort there in the gospel according to Nobby: "Accept loss forever...Object-loss, world-loss, is the precondition for all creation. Creation is in or out of the void; ex nihilo."
Go, Pats!