Rejoicing in the Stadium of the Lord

The accent was foreign, the game, different, but the sentiment is surely familiar:

“Football,” said Bill Shankly, late manager of England’s famous Liverpool soccer team, “is not a matter of life and death. It’s more important than that.”

The XXXth annual observance of Super Bowl Sunday is upon us. From the opening note of the national anthem and the winged blessing of the F-16s, through the closing benediction of the president’s congratulatory call, the participants will follow a litany familiar to XXIX previous Bowls.

And bowing to recent precedent, some of the winners no doubt will be moved to acknowledge divine assistance.

To Joseph Price--a religious studies professor at Whittier College--the analogies between football and worship are so striking that he’s writing a book that places the Super Bowl at the center of a religious experience.

“We don’t think of the Super Bowl as a religious event because we don’t relate a football stadium to a church or mosque or synagogue,” says Price, a Southern Baptist minister like his father and grandfather before him. “But in terms of how it orients people’s life patterns and demands unusual commitment from its followers, the Super Bowl operates like a religion.”

He says that if “Martians were to observe the Super Bowl, they would notice no difference, other than in dress and location, between many things they see there and in a religious setting.”

Price, who hopes to gain precious yardage on the nonacademic playing field with his book, “The Super Bowl as Center of Religious Pilgrimage,” notes that fans--masked in the “identifying religious garb” of team caps and jackets, even face-painting--raise their hands like supplicants in the face of a third down crisis.

And, ultimately, like all believers, fans are required to make a leap of faith across the chasm of doubt.

When all else fails, a Hail Mary pass can bring salvation.

For a football fan, going to the Super Bowl is like making a pilgrimage to Mecca or Jerusalem--or even to those 7-Elevens in the Southwest, where the Virgin Mary has been sighted lately.

Such a journey is meant to entail sacrifice. The edifying content of a trip to the Super Bowl can be measured by how much you had to pay for a ticket, how far away you had to park, and how much grief you got from an aggrieved spouse.

And with corporate sponsors harvesting tickets like sheaves, the average fan has an opportunity to empathize with the plight of the biblical camel trying to pass through the eye of a needle.

“Being there and sharing the experience of being there is what’s important,” Price says. Being there, too, gives the fan a chance to take something away. Medieval pilgrims ponied up for pieces of the true cross and femurs of the martyrs; their heirs try for goal post splinters and NFL seat cushions.

*

Price, who describes himself as “a participant-observer, not a full junkie--unless the Bears are playing,” has been to five Super Bowls in the last 10 years.

Sadly, he’ll miss Sunday’s game in which the Pittsburgh Steelers will test the presumption of America’s--and God’s--team, the Dallas Cowboys. Like the rest of the nation, he’ll have to settle for a televised “sacramental union” in which the fans in Tempe, Ariz., and those on the couches make their joint offerings of Bud and Doritos.

Many will also make offerings to their bookies.

“Gambling establishes a commitment and imparts temporary salvation or reward in ways that exceed one’s initial investment,” Price says. “Winning money is equivalent to gaining grace.”

*

The attempt to reconcile God and football, if not the urge to synthesize them, is of passing interest in South Bend, Ind., where Touchdown Jesus looms over America’s most illustrious team of muscular Christians.

Father Thomas O’Meara, theology professor at the University of Notre Dame, confesses, “I like games a bit.” (And yes, the pope is Catholic.)

Events like the Super Bowl, he says, “fulfill a need and give people a sense of unity.”

“A lot of people see in the game a kind of theater,” O’Meara says. “There is a kind of transcendence . . . a getting beyond the limitations of daily life.”

While O’Meara doesn’t want to stretch the metaphor--”hot dogs are not the Eucharist”--he thinks that participation in sporting festivals reveals a deep, if vague, desire to belong.

And for a few hours on Sunday, people might think that they do belong, or at least not worry that they don’t. For four quarters, football might seem more important than anything else, and somewhere a fan, of the Cowboys most likely, might break into a chorus of that fine religious standard, “Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life.”