A few years ago, during a basketball game that I was watching, a player leaped forward for a loose ball and landed on his knees. He gathered the ball and while doing so he slid across the floor, as he wore kneepads which allowed him to coast along the hardwood for a yard or so. With only a two point lead in the game, this “slide” caused an eruption of fans yelling “Traveling! He traveled!” The referee ignored them and the game continued.
When a timeout was called, the coach approached the referee and, as I was in earshot, I overheard the argument about whether or not the slide constituted a traveling violation. The referee argued for the slide’s innocence and the coach raged about the ruling. So when I went home that night, I had to look up the rule.
From the International Basketball Federation (FIBA) rulebook I found a full page on the violation of “Traveling.” I read it looking for this “slide” scenario to see if the coach or the referee was correct. In rule 25.2.2, I found the answer:
25.2.2 A player falling, lying or sitting on the floor: It is legal when a player falls and slides on the floor while holding the ball or, while lying or sitting on the floor, gains control of the ball. It is a violation if the player then rolls or attempts to stand up while holding the ball.
The referee was correct. A player can slide with the ball, provided he or she doesn’t roll or standup during the slide. The momentum of the slide does not constitute a step. While holding a basketball, you could slide from one end of the gym to the other and not be called for traveling. A slide only becomes a traveling violation if the player in mid-slide or post-slide tries to take a step or roll over.
That was the first time I had ever cracked open a book of basketball rules despite having enjoyed years of playing this sport as a kid. The fact that I had never, not once, referred to a basketball rule in an official document struck me as interesting, because I felt that I knew a solid amount of detail about the game, but never once had I studied the rules. The idea of reading the rules never occurred to me, but playing for hours in driveways and open gyms drew me in like a moth to flame.
Playing or watching the game of basketball, or baseball or football, interested me naturally, and made me grow to love the sport. I could talk endlessly about the sport. Reading the rulebook, however, does not interest me. Aside from referees and coaches, there are probably few people that do read the rulebook.
When kids learn to play a sport, you don't give them the rulebook. No, they first start playing the game and learn the rules as they go, and soon find that the rules are there for good reasons. Take kickball, for instance, where nearly any kid can play and while having fun, learns the rules. By playing kickball, a kid learns most of the rules of baseball and softball, too, since kickball is largely the same game. But no one stops a kickball game to describe how a force-out works by pulling out and referencing the rules of USA Baseball.
In other words, I became interested in a sport by playing the game. The love of a sport grows by practicing the sport. It is the same with faith. Here you may roll your eyes and many will stop reading, as I’ve made the comparison that will drive most readers or listeners right to the “unsubscribe” button.
But consider this. No one gets to faith by reading Leviticus. Likewise, no one reads the Ten Commandments and throws up their hands in prayer. Instead, they throw their hands up in prayer first, and later, perhaps much later, become interested in the Ten Commandments.
This I did not understand. I was hung up on faith and religion due to rules or positions around policies like abortion or immigration or taxes or the welfare state - pick a card, any card. I had opinions and comments for anything and everything, like we all do. But just as I didn't get any closer to faith in my failed attempts to "read the Bible" because I didn’t like certain phrasings and rules, neither did I get closer to faith by reading the daily news, which in large part is always about our modern laws and societal rules.
I believed I could never be a Christian due to Catholic and Evangelical ideas around laws. And I was right. I could not be one. I would never be a Christian because I didn't even understand what it meant to be a Christian. I wasn't practicing. I wasn't playing the game. No, I was scouring the rulebook for things I didn't like. Doing so, I banned myself from the stadium, and so I couldn't play or even be a spectator. I was like a baseball fan who didn’t like the designated hitter rule, so I quit watching the game forever. This reminds me of a quote by the biologist Herbert Spencer:
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
Through my contempt, I was barred from the information and truly stuck in everlasting ignorance. I only saw a stack of rules, and from my angle it blocked any view of the bigger picture.
The faith of Christianity disallows many activities and choices that we desire, like watching porn and getting drunk and having meaningless hookup sex and hoarding money, so yes, there are rules. People really don't like that Christians fence these activities out via their rules. I hated rules as much as the next guy because I loathed having any rules lorded over me. I wanted to be my own boss.
Thus, an impassable mountain sat between me and faith. It is impossible to have faith in the state I occupied because contempt prohibits any attempt. But the rules of the Christian faith were not the problem. I thought the rules were the problem, but that was not the problem. No, it was my yearning to be self-sufficient in all things that blocked a much deeper yearning. I did not want to give up an inch of ground, territory that I imagined I had fought for and won by rejecting the traditions and stories of older generations. Here I was, the modern hero, uprooting the tales of what I considered to be a 2000 year hoax that had somehow duped eighty generations of men and women. Me against the world. If someone had told me, "Freedom comes from obedience, not rebellion," I would have raged at them and spat, "Don't tell me what to do!" That was my motto.
As long as the goal of my life was centered on drinking or money or sex or work, then of course I didn't want any rules. How could I? In private, I wanted to do whatever felt good. In public, I wanted to do whatever made me appear cool to my peers. More importantly, I didn't want to be challenged by anything, ever. Especially, I didn't want to be challenged by rules passed down from ancient, superstitious goat herders who didn't even know that the earth went around the sun. What possible value could I get from bronze age wanderers that had never heard of natural selection or calculus or atomic weight or absolute zero?
That is how the shield formed around me. I bristled at laws that appeared to go against the mantra of "love one another," while crowning myself with the knowledge gained by human ingenuity (not my ingenuity, mind you, but others), I felt that progress through scientific revelation, not religion, would rectify the problems of the past and usher in the glorious future.
There was one devastating problem with these positions. This future utopia through science and economics required me to have a massive amount of faith in humans as a group. In fact, I think it requires more faith to believe in humans than it does to believe in God. After all, we have immense evidence of what humans do to one other, from all ages. Even this week, horrors permeate the news, even while we are right now at the greatest heights of technological prowess and scientific progress.
So this drive for progress that seemed like the answer to fix ourselves and our world, has not done it. Conversely, for all its wonders, progress has simultaneously led to many unanticipated problems. "Every kind of progress is a two-edge sword." This can be observed repeatedly in history, where science or invention introduces or discovers something about the world we live in, and that knowledge can be used for good or evil, usually both. You don’t get fireworks without someone in China first playing around with mixtures of sulfur and saltpeter, but the fun of that first sparkler was quickly recognized as gunpowder for weapons. In the same way, you don’t get to billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide spewing in the atmosphere without hundreds of small accretions of knowledge, take for example Alessandro Volta’s toy pistol that fired a cork when hydrogen touched an electric spark. There is always this give and take with the word “progress", but today the pull of it draws us further away from meaningful questions and has us instead cleave to facts and facts alone, with the idea of God being sidelined ever more each year. This makes the The Big Empty inside us yawn even more and reveal its bottomless chasm.
Faith in science and faith in atheistic ideologies means having faith in humans over God, but here is the devastating problem with that brand of faith: to love one another goes directly against our instincts and those ideologies, without God, cannot claim any kind of foundation for morality. No matter how much knowledge we have, at our core we are flawed with jealousy and hate and lust and greed. This idea about loving one another didn't come from post-Enlightenment thinker like Immanuel Kant or Karl Marx or Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs, it came from Jesus, a carpenter from the first century. This is the underlying problem of everyone who is claiming “love” for their cause. Even atheists like to talk about Jesus and his message of “love one another.” Every group wants a piece of that second commandment. But all of these “loves” quickly contradict each other and we’re left in a pickle. The public campaign of secular and religious groups relentlessly bangs the drum that “love is on our side.” But the secular side only wants the second of Jesus’ two commandments. They reject his first commandment completely. Definitely, we all want the second one, but absolutely not the first one. They want Jesus on their side even while they deny God.
This might be the most fascinating thing of all to me about Jesus.
Even atheists and Marxists somehow want to claim Jesus for their argument. They want Jesus in their corner, but only if he’s got nothing supernatural or transcendent about him. What they don’t seem to realize is that if Jesus is not supernatural, then he’s a liar and a lunatic, which I talked about in my own struggle to come to faith in the Resurrection (known as the Trilemma from C.S. Lewis: Jesus is Lord, lunatic, or liar - and you must pick one).
But there is this magnetism to Jesus, even among those who say they reject God. This is utterly confusing to me. Even those who despise the idea of God will still quote the words of Jesus. Even the atheists say, “But Jesus loved everyone. He loved the murderers and the prostitutes. He wouldn’t judge. Judge not lest yet be judged.” Everyone, believer and non-believer, wants Jesus on their side. I wonder why that is. Why is he so powerful of an idea to us? Why can’t we stop talking about Jesus? What is going on? Somehow, someway, despite every effort of this world to stifle and crush the fire of faith in this carpenter, it fails every time, in every generation. There is a story of Napoleon telling a Cardinal Consalvi that his armies would destroy the church, to which the Cardinal replied: “If in 1,800 years we clergy have failed to destroy the Church, do you really think that you'll be able to do it?” While amusing, it is indeed a fact, one that we are living through once again today. Why is it that nothing can destroy faith in this man, or in his Church? With all these hated rules and prohibitions, where generation after generation fights against it, why does Christianity remain standing?
I have some ideas about that.
