Theology of golf.

During a recent Monday Night Football game, members of opposing teams knelt together in prayer around a player lying prone on the turf with a possible broken neck. "That's a sight that's becoming all too common in this league," one of the announcers said with a tone of unavoidable ambiguity in his voice.

The uncertainty was whether he was expressing concern for the injured man--or contempt for this very public display by Christian athletes.

Perhaps it was a lot of both. This is an age, after all, whose dominant forces constantly converge to push faith to the margins of life. The very notion that overt signs of belief should be the reflexive response to both distress and joy is a source of either apoplexy or scorn.

The antipathy goes beyond refusing prayer a place in sport. It extends to the insistence that those active in religious life somehow betray their convictions by also pursuing an active physical life. So much for the Flying Fathers.

To take a local example, I've heard some rather malicious tittering around the fact that Calgary's Bishop Henry is an avid, and very able, golfer. As one sneering sort said recently: "How does a bishop find time to golf? Shouldn't he be somewhere saving souls or something?"

The assumption was that salvation is something that can only be sought in the crypt-like must of a church basement, and not among the devotees of a well-trammeled fairway.

Having personally taken up the game Mark Twain erroneously dismissed as "a good walk, spoiled", I can attest that there are few places more conducive to opening the soul to God than a golf course.

Granted, not all the prayers of supplication are uttered with right intention. But the sight of a three-wood shot hooking wildly into the trees 150 yards from the green is a perfect way to remind people what flawed creatures they are, and how powerless in the face of forces beyond them.

A great, mighty, walloping drive that skitters five yards off the tee-box and rolls over like an inebriated puppy is unmatched for inducing deep humility. Indeed, as my initiation to the game progressed this summer, I began to work out a kind of theology of golf, finding its mental aspects to be wonderful cultivation for the spiritual life.

You cannot, for instance, hit a golf ball properly when you are full of yourself. Egomaniacs might drive to and from the golf course. But the game will drive them mad unless they empty themselves of themselves.

Anger, rashness, impatience are likewise driven out in due course. Charity and courtesy are heavily stressed, of course, as are honesty and trust. You can seek to hide errors of omission and commission, but your fellow players will politely let you know that (a) they know what you're doing and (b) the person you're really cheating is yourself.

Perhaps most important, however, is golf's constant reminder of the power of faith. It is a prerequisite to the belief in the iffy possibility of using a long stick to hit a very small ball a tremendous distance down a field and into a remarkably tiny hole.

But that's not all. There is the further demand of believing that, no matter how many times you fail, you will eventually succeed, and, more, that even though failure returns you must strive for success again.

As a friend and fellow Christian put it while we played one of the last rounds of the season recently: "The thing about this game is the way you can play it for years, and suddenly your ability to do it mysteriously disappears. You walk around babbling to people that you really do know how to play. Then just as mysteriously it comes back, thank God."

Thanking God does, indeed, help enormously. So do other forms of prayer, which may be why Bishop Henry is such an avid and apt golfer. Those so anxious to push faith to the corners of life might take note.

Or they might just watch Monday Night Football. The player around whom those opposing team members gathered to pray was spared serious injury. In fact, he was checked at a hospital and released that night.

In a better age, the announcer might have unambiguously declared that a miracle.

Peter Stockland writes from Calgary, AB. He is on the staff of the daily paper The Calgary Herald.