Abstract
This chapter explores the meaning of spirituality, focusing on the research of psychologist Kenneth I. Pargament. The sacred is characterized by the qualities of transcendence, ultimacy, boundlessness, interconnectedness, and spiritual emotions. When the sacred is discovered in sport, there are implications for one’s life. These implications and sacred qualities are examined as they may occur in five locations of hope in sport. This chapter demonstrates that multifaceted hope can be a manifestation of the sacred in sport by showing that sacred qualities and implications of finding the sacred are experienced in the five locations of hope. In short, sport has a spiritual dimension.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, Fisher (2011) proposes four domains of spirituality: the personal domain, the communal domain, the environmental domain (connecting with nature), and the transcendental domain (“relating to some-thing or some-One beyond the human level”).
- 2.
I write as a Canadian and often use sports examples from the Canadian context. Since most publications on sport, religion, and spirituality are written by scholars in the United States and the United Kingdom, examples from sports in these countries are more common. My hope is that examples from countries such as Canada that appear less often in this discipline can generate a more global sense of sport as it relates to religion and spirituality.
- 3.
Scientism assumes arguments or findings and their interpretations as objective fact, camouflaging the influence of investigators’ values, assumptions, and perspectives. See, for example, an excellent article by Parry (2005, p. 22). Scientific, evidence-based methods are built on the assumption that every claim is provisional. Every finding and interpretation may be proven false or limited, otherwise there would be no need for further inquiry.
- 4.
Historian Nongbri (2013) provides a very readable of religion as a constructed category. Nongbri points out that the concept of religion is projected onto many ancient cultures, noting that religion has not been a universal concept. Looking back over the past 2000 years, Nongbri concludes that the contemporary assumption that religion is about “inner disposition and concern for salvation” (24) does not apply to antiquity. His analysis supports the notion that through much of antiquity there was no distinction between the “religious” and the secular. Indeed, it was not until modernity (the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) that the category of religion as separate from the secular emerged. In sum, Nongbri argues that the category of religion has been assumed to be natural and universal, when it is, in reality, neither.
- 5.
The more recent SBNR (spiritual but not religious) tendency (I stop short of calling it a movement as this status is not clear) sometimes includes a social justice component, extending well beyond the self and embracing a value system.
- 6.
See, for example, Simon Robinson’s analysis of this historical backdrop (2007).
- 7.
It is important to note that contextual factors including individual experiences, social norms and customs, and cultural features influence what we see as sacred.
- 8.
Bain-Selbo, in his study of southern US college football fans, found that while these fans often used spiritual or religious terms to describe their football fan experiences, they did not often identify these experiences directly as religious (Bain-Selbo 2008).
- 9.
Because spiritual emotions such as awe, joy, and gratitude are interwoven throughout the other four attributes, I do not always explicitly identify spiritual emotions as a distinct attribute.
- 10.
Religious studies scholar Blazer (2012) found that most persuasive understandings of sport as a religion rely on function (form-based), not substantive (content-based), approaches to religion. In fact, content-based arguments tend to demonstrate a disjuncture between sport and religion. Pargament’s substantive and functional approach to spirituality, from a psychological perspective, provides an alternative lens through which to understand sport’s spiritual dimension.
- 11.
This fourth implication is included in all relevant sources in which Pargament is an author, except for the Pomerleau et al. (2016) article.
- 12.
See Markovitz and Albertson for a helpful summary of relevant research studies (Markovits and Albertson 2012, pp. 159–160).
- 13.
Included under enjoyment was the appreciation of the aesthetic dimension of sport (2014, p. 251).
- 14.
Pargament explains that there has been a tendency within psychological research to diminish or deny spirituality as a motivation in and of itself. Instead, motivations for subscribing to a religion tend to be explained away in “psychological, social, or physiological” terms (2013b, p. 271). Part of the reason for this overlooking of spirituality as irreducible, Pargament offers, is that psychologists as a group in the United States are much less theistic than the general population of the country. It may well be that attempts to understand sports fans’ and athletes’ motivations have been affected by the same myopia.
- 15.
Elsewhere I have considered the spiritual quality of hope and posit that there are four locations of hope in sport and that these locations of hope attract both fans and athletes (Trothen 2015, pp. 115–132). I now suggest that one of the locations of hope that I have identified is better understood as two separate locations.
- 16.
Ellis proposes that sports spectators are more than spectators and have vicarious relationships with the players, noting that spectators expressed a strong sense of identification with the team.
- 17.
Pastoral theologians have written about embedded and deliberative theologies. See, for example, Stone and Duke (1996) and Doehring (2015). When a faith conviction is not deliberately examined and reevaluated in relation to lived experiences, including those of suffering, loss and systemic injustice, the faith claim may cease to make sense and not hold up in times of extreme stress.
- 18.
Some studies suggest that diversity can be promoted effectively in recreational sport, combating societal prejudices (see, for example Bridel and Rail 2007).
- 19.
See Chap. 3 of this title (pp. 51–70) for an in-depth exploration of the perspectives of several religions on perfection, and the relationship between sport, religion, and perfection.
- 20.
Bain-Selbo argues that “the experience of the religious adherent and the experience of the Southern college football fan are essentially the same flow experiences; they are simply labeled differently.”
- 21.
Very briefly, these eight elements are: clarity of goals and immediate feedback; a high level of concentration; a close match between one’s perceived skills and the challenge; a feeling of control; effortlessness; an altered perception of time; the melting together of action and consciousness; and the experience of the autotelic quality of the sport. For more explanation and analysis please see Flow in Sports: The Keys to Optimal Experiences and Performance (Jackson and Csikszentmihalyi 1999). For a fan to experience flow, they would need to identify strongly with the athlete(s); for example, the fan must be fully convinced that the athlete’s abilities make the athletic challenge possible but not easily possible.
- 22.
O’Gorman addresses fan violence and sums up the explanation for this provided by Franklin Foer in How Football Explains the World (2004. London: Arrow Books, p. 13).
- 23.
Wann studied the motivations of 272 sports fans and found no “relationship between level of economic motivation and self-proclaimed fandom.”
- 24.
If people discover the sacred in sport, this has implications for therapeutic care. Instead of ignoring sports talk, spiritual care providers need to listen more attentively, assuming sport may be about hope as a manifestation of the sacred.
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Trothen, T.J. (2018). Spirituality and Sport: Searching for the Sacred. In: Spirituality, Sport, and Doping: More than Just a Game. SpringerBriefs in Religious Studies(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02997-5_1
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