Saturday, May 10, 2025

 

Gameplay as the arena for gratitude and chivalry

Douglas Blake Olds

 [My son honored me by asking for some ideas about gratitude and a sermon about teamwork. Follows the text I sent him about the former and under that is the sermon about the latter.]

 

Culture and teamwork, like gratitude, are cultivated. We emulate who we admire. So that gratitude is foundational to the tested friendships I’ve found with you. Not just loyalty to a goal and collective, but admiration for your gifts behind your acts. My gratitude has been sparked by your qualities and energies that never settle toward a stage or system, but in the pursuit of excellence amid the drama and sharing of gifts applied to sporting moments that develop the character of our community.

Men heal, I think, in a specific way by sport without artifice, diffusing conflict by training the mind to step out of the way of muscle, instead allowing gameplay to shape dignifying respect and generosity to teammates and the other team. We need not go along with the mania of crowds with its thirst for and prestige accorded to violence and strife of machismo. But instead to cultivate gratitude for the play and dance of light in our games, and for our harmonies of actions. My gratitude deepens for the opportunity to express friendship with others, but also in every time and place, no matter how troubling, where I find spaces of beauty and challenge without assault and appropriation. This is to be grateful for created and sacred people and places, and the honor to share these with you.

The Play Before the Pass: On Teamwork as Chivalry

Rev. Douglas Olds

May 10, 2025

 

Introduction:

In sport, as in life, the temptation is always to focus on the highlight—the buzzer-beater, the game-winning goal, the victory lap, the after-party. But these are never solitary triumphs. They are made possible by gestures before the moment—by sacrifices and anticipations that don’t always make the highlight reel.

What appears small or incomplete—setting a screen, passing instead of shooting, covering for a teammate’s error—can be the most foundational form of graceful motion. The fragment of sport is not weakness; it is a team aligning under pressure. The moment before the moment.

 Chivalry and the Anticipation of Hospitality:

Now a dated word, chivalry was once reserved for medieval valor. But its core is not war—it is service. True chivalry spiritual courage expressed through humility, appropriate vigor gentling, and embodied care of others. Chivalry reflects the posture of the teamwork of virtue. Gameplay is moral imagination in action.

Teamwork is a hospitable readiness—a virtue that doesn’t wait to be asked. It anticipates need. It anticipates partnership. It prepares the space for another’s flourishing.

In team sport, chivalry lives in the player who runs to cover a position vacated, who passes instead of glorying in the shot, who brings calm where chaos brews. It is the act of love that precedes the score. It transfigures the profane space of competition into an offering of trust.

The virtues of sport include patient endurance, gratitude, loyalty, hospitality and courage, as losses and pangs of falling reconstruct and extend faithful teamwork.

Sport becomes more than contest; it becomes a shaping ground for anticipatory imagination, where each action prepares for grace to sweep through us and direct our intention to opportunity. Where we engage for opportunity, where its moments are like berries in the shadow understory branches. Working through these virtues as we train, team, and energize help us collectively find these berries of opportunity emerging in our awareness.

 The fragmentary moment in sport is not what’s broken—it’s what’s offered. Each touch of the frisbee, each hand raised in defense, each moment of restraint is a microburst of meaning, a brief kinetic gesture that gives shape to something larger. Even larger than this team. Instead, where we assemble a harmony of breathing, of Spirit.

The team animated by chivalry breathes. It doesn’t just win—it builds.

And this building is slow. It requires endurance and training

Application:

Think of our team not as an oiled machine but as a dwelling place—a house prepared by mutual trust that allows anticipation and each one’s gifts. Every member’s living awareness is married to kinesthetic control centered around the spirit of the team: Some captain an opening, some patrol open space. All are fragments. But none are forgettable.

To be a teammate is to live by anticipating fragments of a game: not to complete everything, but to begin well. To give something meaningful even when it goes unseen. To stabilize another when they are fatigued. To pass before the pass. To dance the game by holding space for another, and when space is vacated, to spy for an opportunity for movement, to spring forward with both athletic and virtuous grace. To align awareness for the game as a team defined not by the match’s scoreboard, but through the qualities of its effort.