When I was seven years old, I lost my faith in organized recreation.
My problem wasn’t physical activity: I played pick-up hockey, skied, swam, canoed, hiked and competed at gymnastics throughout my teens. It wasn’t that I lacked for mentors and models: northern Ontario was full of local boys who made good in the storied NHL. As a kid in Timmins, Ont., I thawed out many a frozen toe around the red-hot stove in many a hockey shack. I loved the stories, the mythology, the hockey cards, including the ones about the local legend Father Les Costello, whose sermons were laced with hockey references. Okay …know-it-all preachers kid that I was, I thought that Father Costello was a goofball. But the voices of Foster and Bill Hewitt and the refrain, “He shoots, he scores!” were the soundtrack of my childhood.
No, my first problem was that you had to have that burning drive to compete, to win, to head for that corner and out-play, out-muscle, out-manoeuvre—do whatever it took to dig that puck away from your opponent’s stick. My heart wasn’t in the heart of hockey.
My second problem was that, somewhere between hockey practice and handsprings, I fell in love with rhythm, with words and music, with song. Soon there was no competition; whatever time has been given to me has, in some way or other, been about making music.
And so it was ironic that in early February I found myself hunkered down with Rev. Kristine O’Brien, planning Hockey Sunday at Trafalgar Presbyterian. She had named Sunday, Feb. 7, 2010 as Hockey Sunday at Trafalgar. She invited Rev. Jeff Crawford to speak on the spirituality of hockey, and on the conflict between the call to worship and the commitment to be there for the first faceoff at centre ice.
Besides being an ordained minister, Jeff is an OHL referee. His clerical collar goes particularly well with his black-and-white striped referee jersey and, as he said in his sermon, inspires many interesting conversations at the rink.
So … what music did we use? Our band—comprising flute, trumpet, clarinet, sax, violins, guitar and percussion along with the more usual piano—responded to the words of the call to worship with the Hockey Night in Canada theme along with other well-known arena themes. Those choices might seem jarring, except for the fact that many worshippers that morning were sporting hockey sweaters. There were also soccer jerseys scattered through the crowd … um, congregation.
For hymns, we could have chosen Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown (#693) for its wrestling image, or Where is Death’s Sting, with its lines about “a great adventure with a glorious goal,” and “more life and more adventure for the brave” (#790) though the tunes of both those selections are way too reserved and well-behaved for a sports theme. We could have sung Dare to Be a Daniel from the 1972 Book of Praise, except that its image bank is drawn from the battle front rather than the blue line. And, come to think of it, so are most of the adrenaline-laced praise and worship songs in recent memory.
We began by singing Jim Strathdee’s “Come let us sing to the Lord our song / We have stood silently too long” (#412 in The Book of Praise) in honour of all those hockey crowds who stand and don’t sing O Canada. We sang This One Thing I Do, (# 628), with its paraphrase of verses drawn from Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “I run toward the mark of the high calling of God” (that’s one of mine). We ended the service with Sydney Carter’s One More Step Along the World I Go” (#641).
We didn’t come to worship sports. We all knew that God was the Lord we had gathered to worship on that cold, snowless morning in February. But it made me look again at all the sports imagery in the New Testament epistles. It reminded me of the deep connection between play and worship, both among the most serious things we do as humans. And … it gave me an appreciation of good ol’ Father Les Costello.
