The Nation's Weekly Mass: Hockey Night in Canada

My friends and I are creatures of habit. If you needed to find any one of us on a Saturday night, you would only need to search the table in front of the large television screen at the local sports restaurant. It is our own weekly ritual. No matter what is going on, it is a guarantee that a familiar face will be sitting at that wobbly and sticky table that has had one too many Coke’s spilt across it. So when we discussed the relationship between religion and sports in class, I began to see this interaction in a very personal light. Enjoying these Saturday night face-offs parallels the experiences of Sunday mass. You sit amongst a congregation of worshipers, you all listen to Don Cherry’s weekly sermon and no matter how many times the Leafs lost that week (or in the last decade), you never lose hope. Just as you do not need a Stanley Cup to substantiate your devotion to the Leafs, you do not need proof of God to believe his work.

During lecture this week, the relationship between the economics of sport and its religiosity was brought into question. It was argued that any religious meaning conveyed through sport was distorted by the unbalanced business workings behind these national leagues. How can the religious experience inside and outside of sport be legitimate when it is fuelled by capitalistic interest? I think if we reserve our study of how sport functions AS religion to an analysis of its economic workings, we cannot fully appreciate how positive values are perpetuated through participating and watching. Now, I am not saying that I support the outrageous amounts of money placed on player’s heads nor do I support the unnecessary amount of violence (comments which I am saving for my next blog post), but I do want to establish that sport serves an important function as religion.

As someone who has always been involved in sports and other group activities, I have experienced the discipline and devotion that develops. There are many non-contact sports that provide people with the opportunity to enjoy these spiritual opportunities in which they encounter patience, temperance, respect, and different forms of love. We cannot rule out the important function sport serves in recreating religious experiences and teaching religious values simply because of the economics of national leagues. To the individual, sports provide the opportunity to enjoy a form of spirituality that they may not have otherwise been able to understand.