Skip to main content

Life is a Gamble

My friend, John Punshon, died some months ago.  I came to know John in the very early 1980s.  He had been appointed a Quaker Tutor at a Quaker college that is part of the University of Birmingham in England.  I spent a sabbatical year at that college and came to know John fairly well.  John helped me understand British Quakers and he taught me many other things as well.
   
John was a very bright guy.  He was educated at Oxford and enjoyed some of the privilege that goes with that.  But he was never arrogant and was able easily to relate to common people.  After all, John’s own family and upbringing were not wealthy, upper-crust kinds of folk.  With his upbringing and education, he was able to straddle two worlds. 
   
After coming to know him fairly well, John joined me throughout the 1990s and others on the faculty of the college I taught.  It was wonderful to have his collegiality and his friendship.  He was fun and funny.  He embodied the British humor that is different than our American humor.  John was a popular teacher and wrote a fair amount.  Much of what he wrote grew out of conversations he had with me and countless others.  So when we would read his next article or book, there were always the familiar parts and, then, the surprises that we had no idea he was including in the writing piece.
   
John was asked to offer the lecture at a very special annual Quaker lecture in Great Britain.  That lecture grew into a small book, which John entitled, Testimony & Tradition.  I have my own signed copy from John, which I now cherish even more.  When I learned of John’s death, memories flooded through my mind.  And within a few days I was asked to write a memorial reflection that will be included in a special journal honoring his life and work.  This invitation provoked me to pull some of his writings from the shelf and look through them.
   
One of my favorite stories from John comes at the end of that Testimony & Tradition book.  John shares some memories of his grandfather.  He begins by saying, “My grandfather was enormous.”  John tells us that his grandfather taught him many lessons in life.  I like how John nuances his grandfather’s pedagogy.  John says his grandfather taught him, “not through what he said so much as by what he was.”  I never met John’s grandfather, but it is easy to begin imagining him.  But none of this is worth much until we see what comes next.
   
I smiled when I read a little further and came upon this sentence.  “One of these lessons is that it does not really make sense to watch a sporting event without gambling on the result.”  You can imagine how some Quaker ears would hear this passage!  Quakers are not known for their gambling prowess.  So I am confident John told this story to get the audience’s attention and, no doubt, to poke some fun at his fellow Quakers.  And it is really a set up for where he wants to go.

John gives his reason why you gamble on sporting events.  “The reason is that much sport is ritual, and not sport.  In rituals, unseen changes of a very serious nature are taking place, and are of great importance to the participants.  To observe rituals for enjoyment is a species of sacrilege.  You cannot watch boxing for fun.  You have to have something riding on the result.  You have got to stand to lose.”  In clever fashion John has gone from boxing to ritual.  Very quickly he is talking about sacrilege, which implicates the sacred.  Almost magically, through boxing John has shown us that life has something riding on it.  You can lose!  Life is risky.

This is where John really wants the reader to go.  Inherently, we know that life is risky.  In fact, most of us try to eliminate or, at least, minimize risk.  Many of us are risk-averse.  I think institutional religion becomes this way.  And to become risk-averse is to risk losing the Spirit.  I am confident the Spirit is always doing a new thing---sometimes in the form of renewing.  And this often calls for change, but too many of us want nothing to do with change---especially when it comes to religion.

It is at this point John allows that he does not watch boxing or gamble.  But he has set us up to make what will be the final point.  He says, “The principle I am trying to illustrate is that there is all the difference in the world between playing a game yourself and watching other people play.”  In this sense religion is like sport.  You play; don’t become a spectator. 

This is exactly where John wanted to take us.  “The same principle holds good in religion.  Many people think they are practicing religion when they are in fact only thinking about it.  They do not realize that knowledge of religious truth comes only through practice and is inaccessible to thought alone.  This is because religion is an activity and has to be done to be understood.”

Life is a gamble.  Thanks to John, we know we should bet on it!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I-Thou Relationships

Those of us who have read theology or, perhaps, those who are people of faith and are old enough might well recognize this title as a reminder of the late Jewish philosopher and theologian, Martin Buber.   I remember reading Buber’s book, I and Thou , when I was in college in the 1960s.   It was already a famous book by then.   I am not sure I fully understood it, but that would not be the last time I read it.   It has been a while since I looked at the book.             Buber came up in a conversation with a friend who asked if I had seen the recent article by David Brooks?   I had not seen it, but when I was told about it, I knew I would quickly locate and read that piece.   I very much like what Brooks decides to write about and what he contributes to societal conversation.   I wish more people read him and took him seriously.             Brooks’ article focused on the 2016 contentious election.   He provocatively suggests, “Read Buber, Not the Polls!”   I think Brooks puts

Spiritual Commitment

I was reading along in a very nice little book and hit these lines about commitment.   The author, Mitch Albom, uses the voice of one of the main characters of his nonfiction book about faith to reflect on commitment.   The voice belongs to Albom’s old rabbi of the Jewish synagogue where he went until his college days.   The old rabbi, Albert Lewis, says “the word ‘commitment’ has lost its meaning.”    The rabbi continues in a way that surely would have many people saying, “Amen!”   About commitment he says, “I’m old enough when it used to be a positive.   A committed person was someone to be admired.   He was loyal and steady.   Now a commitment is something you avoid.   You don’t want to tie yourself down.”   I also think I am old enough to know that commitment was usually a positive word.   I can think of a range of situations in which commitment would have been seen to be positive.   For example, growing up was full of sports for me.   Commitment would have been presupposed t

Inward Journey and Outward Pilgrimage

There are so many different ways to think about the spiritual life.   And of course, in our country there are so many different variations of religious experiences.   There are liberals and conservatives.   There are fundamentalists and Pentecostals.   Besides the dizzying variety of Christian traditions, there are many different non-Christian traditions.   There are the major traditions, such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and so on.   There are the slightly more obscure traditions, such as Sikhism, Jainism, etc.   And then there are more fringe groups and, even, pseudo-religions.   There are defining doctrines and religious practices.   Some of these are specific to a particular tradition or a few traditions, such as the koan , which is used in Zen Buddhism for example.   Other defining doctrines or practices are common across the religious board.   Something like meditation would be a good example.   Christians meditate; Buddhists meditate.   And other groups practice this spiri