By Kit Carlson

"We want tacos! We want tacos!"

The score in the Breslin Center is Michigan State 68, Indiana 53. At 70 points, ticket holders can receive a free taco from Taco Bell after the game. The Izzone, MSU's vaunted student section (named for coach Tom Izzo), is hopping up and down, roaring. The ball slips home, the score shoots to 70, and the place explodes from floor to rafters.

Tacos achieved, the Izzone gets back to the business at hand: a highly choreographed series of actions, cheers and songs that remind me not so much of my past life in college fandom (In my day, we wore what we wanted, yelled what we wanted, and plastered our venues with rude signs. Those days are done.) as it does my past experiences in cathedral liturgies. Something like the Presiding Bishop's installation, for example, where each moment requires a specific gesture, song or prayer, done with grandeur and at top volume.

College sports are fun, exciting, adrenaline-producing spectacles. They also create ample opportunities for breaking Commandment Number One: Thou shalt have no other gods before me. The gods of college sports, be they the God of Football, the God of Hockey, or omigod, the God of Basketball, seem to demand ever-grander displays of devotion from their faithful followers.

When students enter the Breslin Center, they are vested in white Izzone t-shirts. You must wear a white Izzone t-shirt if you want to sit in your prized courtside student section. Postulants for the Izzone (freshmen!) must also vest in white Izzone t-shirts, even though THEIR section is up in the corner of the roof. If they are good postulants, they may get tickets in the courtside section the next year.

Upon entering the Izzone, each seat has a service leaflet which outlines the game ahead, the teams' strengths and weaknesses, and which players to keep your eye on. The back of the leaflet has rubrics describing how the section is to conduct itself during the introduction of players, how it is to count down the shot clock in order to confuse the visiting team, and which way it is to wave its arms if seated behind the baskets when opponents step up to the free throw line.

Like any worshippers experienced in the liturgy of the season, Izzone members know all the hymns by heart -- The MSU Fight Song prominent among them. They know all the congregational prayers, from "We want tacos!" to "I-Z-Z-O" to "Who's Your Daddy?" They even know liturgical dance -- they hop up and down, roaring maniacally when the opponent has possession, then maintain holy silence when their man is at the free throw line.

The God of Basketball seems to have been propitated by the Izzone's devotion -- the Spartans were undefeated in Breslin all season long. The business of commandment breaking, I'll leave to their own consciences.

As March Madness comes upon us, one might debate who has the greatest liturgical power in basketball: MSU's Izzone or Duke's Cameron Crazies, or the Den at UCLA. But there is no debate -- and I never want to hear again that old canard -- that modern-day young people would be confused and put off by our Episcopal liturgies. Just get them inside. They'll know what to do. I can hear them now ...

We want wafers! We want wafers!

The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and was associate and interim rector at the Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, Md., for seven years.

By Jennifer McKenzie

There’s a bullet that we’ve somehow managed to dodge for lo these many years as a family. And we knew it would hit us soon enough. Well, this week it hit. We got the word from our all-star soccer team coach via email that our big tournament games had been scheduled: Game 1 would be played on Saturday at 9:15 a.m. Game 2 would be later that day at 2:15 p.m. Ah, but Game 3 would be played….yep, here it comes: Sunday morning at 8 a.m. And, on Father’s Day no less!

I really had to think hard about the email reply: send just to the coach or hit “reply to all?” I decided to broadcast. Not to be snippy, but to be a witness. As someone who has led youth groups in the church for the past 20 years and understands the value of teamwork; as someone who is a soccer mom who roots HARD for the home team; as someone who is a priest, albeit on a mini-sabbatical between calls…I am just plain sick and tired of the level to which our kids’ organized sports has risen and the unrealistic demands that these leagues and teams place on families. So I braced myself and began to type:

“Hi coach:

We will see you on Saturday. However, Sunday is a no-go for us before noon – we’re just not willing to bend to the cult of sports on this one! (I can’t believe they would schedule a Father’s day tournament so early on a Sunday morning in the first place…). If there is an afternoon game on Sunday, let us know and we’ll get the guys there.

See you at practice tonight, barring more bad weather.”

(Can’t you just hear the “Chariots of Fire” theme song playing in the background?)

Our 12-year-old twins, who have played a heck of a season both on offense and defense – their team placed 1st in the league for the regular season and 2nd in the league play-offs – were chagrined at best when we broke the news to them. “Mooooo-oooommmm!” “Yes, guys, I know it’s disappointing, but you’ll get to play in the first two games. And, besides, soccer is just a sport; Christianity is our way of life.” Well that one went over like a fart in church.

Is it just me? I don’t think it is. Soccer, hockey, lacrosse, basketball, travel tiddly-winks – you name the sport, and there are kids staying away from church in droves because of it. “It’s just for a season,” their parents will say. “We really hate that this takes them away from youth group/Sunday School/children’s choir – but we just don’t know what to do. We’ve made a commitment to the team.” Uh-huh. Hmmph. Interesting.

Recently, I read a brilliant take on something seemingly tangential, but I think really at the heart of this hostile takeover by the junior sporting industry. Someone in an article or book somewhere smartly said something like this: (if anyone recognizes this thought, please let me know so I can give proper credit) “Parents seem to take a different approach to the faith lives of their children than to any other aspect of their development. ‘I don’t think it’s healthy to make them to go to church. I think they should make up their own minds about what they believe - but I do want to expose them to it, so we encourage them to go when we can,’ they say. But what if we took this approach with other areas of their lives? ‘I was forced to attend school as a kid and thought it was pretty boring – sometimes torturous. So, I don’t want to make my kid go to school – that would be unhealthy. We’ll take him the first couple of times to expose him to it, and then let him decide.’ Or maybe, ‘I think sports and fitness is a good thing, so I’m taking my daughter to the pool. But I don’t want to force her to swim– I just want to expose her to swimming. So I won’t make her wear a suit. I’ll just have her look at the water, maybe stick her toes in, and watch some other folks swim a bit – see what she thinks.”

This notion of “exposing” kids to faith – with a fragile level of commitment and a lack of determination and diligence on the part of parents – just seems ludicrous to me. If you don’t practice your faith, you’ll never really get the hang of it, or even know if it’s something you want to get the hang of. When you’re a member of a church, you make a commitment to the team (a.k.a. ‘the Body of Christ’) to be there – not just when you feel like it – but pretty much every darned Sunday for worship and at least occasionally during the week for ministry.

Look, I love sports. I love what sports has taught my kids. Sports are good for physical fitness, emotional development, and self-discipline. And sports can provide a good analogy for a life of faith. But playing sports is not a substitute for that life of faith. When we as parents allow sports to encroach and even supersede the practice of faith – which for Christians happens primarily on Sunday mornings – then we are compromising the most important facet of their development as responsible, compassionate, beloved children of God: an inner life of faith lived out robustly in a committed community of embrace and nurture.

The Rev. Jennifer McKenzie, keeps the blog The Reverend Mother. She is the author of “Benedictine Spirituality and Congregational Life: Living Out St. Benedict’s Rule in the Parish” from the Winter 2004 issue of Congregations Magazine.

If you read Bob Lipsyte's essay about faith and football that I posted yesterday, you might wonder about the wisdom of this decision by the NFL.

The great Bob Lipsyte, former New York Times columnist, and young adult novelist extraordinaire, has a terrific essay about the Super Bowl on The Nation's Web site. It begins:

Given the chance, I'd watch the Super Bowl with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who knows about Baal and ball. Twenty years ago, in Lynchburg, Virginia, at a Liberty University Flames game, Dr. Falwell told me: "Jesus was no sissy. He was tough, he was a he-man. If he played football, you'd be slow getting up after he tackled you."

He had me at "sissy." The rest was revelation. The muscularity of Dr. Falwell's evangelical Christianity was a perfect fit with football, another win-or-lose game. For Americans, war hasn't produced a real winner for more than 60 years. That's why we need football. But let's get back to Dr. Falwell. "My respect for Catholicism and Mormonism goes straight up watching Notre Dame and Brigham Young play," he told me. He hoped that, someday, Notre Dame and Liberty, his evangelical college, would meet for the national championship, thus informing the nation that "the Christians are here, we're not meek and we're not going to fall down in front of you. We're here to stay."

Read it all.

Full disclosure: I have been a fan of Bob's since I read The Contender in the seventh grade. He helped me get my first book published, and I am forever in his debt.

But it would still be a terrific essay, even if we'd never met.

...of the 2006 St. Andrew's Boys Cross Country team is here. The state champs are pictured here. Both girls squads won state championships as well.

I listen to sports radio, and sometimes during football season, the newscasts are one long injury report. Someone has pulled a hamstring. Someone has tweaked an ankle. Someone has aggravated a tendon. Someone has strained a groin. (A groin?)

Anyway, in the midst of one such report today I learned something truly significant. Somewhere in this great country of ours, a professional football player is nursing a calf.

I know a lot has happened this week, but this is a breakthrough for our species, and I think it deserves wider play.

The eyes of the sports-loving world were focused on the Bullis School in Potomac, Md., on Saturday morning for the Metropolitan Athletic Conference's Junior Varsity Cross Country championship race. And by "the sports-loving world" I mean "blood relatives of the contestants, and a few of their friends."

A story about the meet is here, and a picture of the four all-conference JV runners from the victorious team from St. Andrew's Episcopal School is here.

If you are curious about the relevance of this item, can I just point out how handsome that kid in the long-sleeved blue shirt is?

If you visit the blog much, you know that I am under the illusion that I have something useful to say about youth sports. Almost thirty years ago, I covered the Little League World Series, as an intern at Newsday, and while I enjoyed it then, I am uneasy about what it has become. I am uneasy for similar reasons about the media's growing fascination with ranking high school sports teams. Alissa Quart, author of Hothouse Kids: The Dilemma of the Gifted Child has written an op-ed piece in today's New York Times that articulates my principal concerns. An excerpt:

"Youth competitions can certainly have positive effects. They can expand children’s social worlds, make them feel less isolated and give them a sense of mastery and discipline. But when TV cameras are added to the mix, the stakes can change. At televised competitions, I have seen children turn their faces away from the cameras so that their tears wouldn’t be visible — the pathos of the losers when forced to confront the winners being filmed. Even some of the winners responded with self-consciousness. Watching this happen in real time convinced me that high school football games, spelling bees and other pageants and competitions of youth should be witnessed in actual fields, halls and stadiums rather than on television sets. "

Elizabeth Kaeton has raised an interesting issue at her blog, Telling Secrets, about the Sunday morning competition between churches and sports leagues. I'm both a church employee and a long, longtime youth sports coach, and I've been swapping emails with her and one or two other folks on this topic. My thoughts are distilled beneath the "continue reading" button.

Read more »

This weekend, Barry Bonds surpassed Babe Ruth by hitting his 715th career home run. He is now 40 homers behind Hank Aaron, baseball home run king. I've got nothing new to say about Bonds. But I thought I could chip in a bit about Aaron.

Nineteen years ago I had a chance to spend a few hours talking with him and following him around for The Washington Post. To see the story, a long one, click on the "keep reading" link.

Read more »

I had to take a blog break last week to work on a research project. I hope to be offering much more regular updates this week. Any college basketball fans out there? I am a Syracuse alum, and went to the same high school in Scranton, Pa., as the Orange's star guard Gerry McNamara. Awfully proud of what he's accomplished in the last few days.

Here in DC we are gearing up for baseball season. Tom Boswell, a former colleague of mine at the Post, (and an Episcopal schools alum as I recall) has written a number of wonderful baseball books, but the one I like best is Why Time Begins on Opening Day. It is a terrific title, but, strictly speaking, not correct. If you play ball and are trying to get your 49-year-old body in shape to run bases, field grounders, etc., you've got to start before opening day or else you will be sucking wind just running out a ground ball. So I am sucking a lot of wind these days on the treadmill and in the streets of my neighborhood so that I won't be sucking wind come mid-April. And if you are involved in youth leagues, you've got to register the kids and recruit new coaches and schedule practices, etc., etc., etc.

In its way, getting ready for baseball season--my own and my kids'--deepens my sense of Lent as a season of mortification, preparation and renewal.

One of the reasons people watch sports is to feel morally superior to the athletes.

Every one of us sitting at home on the couch knows with absolute certainty that if we were competing in, say, the Winter Olympics that we would be trying harder than contestants themselves. We know we would reach every loose puck first due to the quality of our desire--not like the U. S. Men's Hockey team that was tied by lowly Lativa, or the women's team that was denied a place in the finals by upstart Sweden. We know we would never engage in ostentatious celebration after or on the brink of victory--like Lindsey Jacobellis, the snowboarder. And we are certain that were we to lose (unthinkable, of course due to the "quality of desire" clause just mentioned) that we would behave with such absolute and appealing dignity, that our loss would be remembered only as the necessary precedent of a transcendent display of grace. In other words, we would never blame it on, say, a bus driver, as U. S. figure skater Johnny Weir did, or seem not to care--like U. S. skier Bode Miller.

This, at least, is the impression I am drawing from the torrent of moral hand wringing unleashed by the lackluster performance of the U. S. team at the Winter Olympics. And I didn't even mention the me-first attitude of that selfish Michelle Kwan, who, from what I can ascertain, inconvenienced almost no one by waiting until the Games were near at hand before deciding that her injury hadn't healed sufficiently to allow her to participate.

Now I must confess that I am a card-carrying member of the "sports build moral character" caucus. Well, actually, I am a t-shirt-wearing member. The Positive Coaching Alliance, of which I am a charter member, doesn't give out cards. But it does proselytize, and I have done my share of evangelization, trying to persuade organizations and individuals to train "double goal" coaches, people who focus not only on winning games, but on teaching kids to honor the game. So I am as likely, maybe more likely, than the next person to criticize athletes for character flaws which, unfortunately, are broadcast for all the world to see.

That said, as a former sportswriter I also know that sometimes athletes just lose because they couldn't harness all of the mysterious elements that go into producing a top performance on that particular day, or because their opponents had exploited a previously undetected weakness, or because the opponent the other guys or gals were just plain better than anybody thought they were.

The unpredictable nature of athletic performance plays a larger role in competitions such as the Olympics which, from the public's point of view, is pretty much a one-shot deal. There is no regular season over which an athlete establishes excellence in the public's mind. There is just one win-or- lose moment, much as there is during the NCAA’s March Madness, or other single-elimination tournaments. This is part of the charm of these events. You sense that something is at stake, a feeling you don't get watching a mid-season doubleheader between, say, the Baltimore Orioles and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

And because so much is at stake, we assume that the athletes will therefore be at their best, because surely, the ability to summon a top performance for a momentous event is the mark of a champion.

Or so I read. And so, I assume, we feel justified in drawing large lessons about a person’s character from what they achieve, or fail to achieve, sliding down a mountain or standing at the free throw line on some random afternoon. But this is where we go astray. Events like the Olympics and March Madness don’t teach us lessons about athletic excellence of human character, they obscure them, the way that fundamentalists who focus on a few verses of Scripture obscure—distort might be a better word—the larger meaning of the text. The best team doesn’t win every game. The best horse doesn’t win every race. Individuals, whether they are athletes or not, very rarely reveal themselves in a single moment, except in fiction.

The temptation to which we succumb in watching sports is to read real life as though it were a novel or a film, to assume that the athletes are characters, not people—that they exist only on the screen, on the page, in the moment that we encounter them, and in no other. This isn’t fair to them, but, to be honest, I can’t usually get too worked up about that. They have been extravagantly blessed in their physical gifts. In most instances, they have been extravagantly compensated for what they do. What annoys and troubles me is the torrent of lazy moralizing that flows forth when athletes don’t perform in the ways we expect them to perform. The speed and certainty with which we pass judgment on them, and on other public figures, for that matter, says more about our character than it does about the characters of those we judge. It suggests intolerance of complexity and ambiguity, and a need to be fed fairy tales with easily digestible morals.

Every year, the Most Valuable Player of the Super Bowl is captured on film as he walks off the field shouting, “I’m going to Disney World.” We hate it, though, when athletes remind us through their failures that we aren’t already living in the Magic Kingdom.

Those of you who will be admitted first to heaven no doubt are aware that pitchers and catchers report to spring training in 16 days and two hours, as I write. But some of you probably watch football.

The Super Bowl will be played this Sunday. If the game follows form, some athlete, at some point, will thank his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for his success. Or he will score a touchdown and point to the sky.

What do we make of this? How involved is God in the Super Bowl? Is victory a sign of God's favor? If so, what is the significance of defeat?

As a former sports writer who travelled with a few teams, I can tell you that the good guys don't always win and that surly misanthropes and unrepentant serial adulterers are quite capable of publc piety.

All this has made me wish that athletes and other celebs would keep their prayers private. But perhaps there is value in celebrity witness? If so, is what you see on the Super Bowl the kind of witness we are looking for?