It is a cold Sunday afternoon in December and I am ready for some football. The spectacle of grown men pummeling each other in mad pursuit of a spherical ball is the perfect accompaniment for completing my Christmas correspondence. I turn on the television, which is pre-set on PBS, as that’s all we watch aside from NFL football. We are high-brow heathens.
It’s pledge time on PBS and they are showing segments of Rick Stevens’ European Christmas. The Norwegian Girl’s Choir is singing “Joy to the World”; I pause, momentarily enchanted by combination of Christmas music with video footage of a distinctly non-commercial manner.
“Huh, I think I know this one,” Mr. P comments from behind his computer. Mr. P is, maddeningly, working on actual work, communing with some distant database via a black terminal screen and rapid-fire unix commands.
“You know this one?” I ask. Laughter bursts over. “Well, aren’t you well-versed in your Christmas carols? Let me ask you, who doesn’t know this one? It’s freaking ‘Joy to the World!'”
Entirely unfair, I know, to harass a Frenchman in regards to what is a historically English hymn that doesn’t get much play in France, although the youth of Norway seem to be keen on it.
The next segment features Pope John Paul II giving a Christmas mass.
“Huh, is that the Pope, babe?” Mr. P asks, peering at the screen at the little gray-haired man in a white cap speaking Latin.
“No, it’s Michael Jackson,” I retort with an evil grin.
“Huh! Babe is being sarcastic today,” he says, typing away. It’s hard to rile my husband, which is good because most normal men would’ve killed me by now.
I watch the Pope natter away unconvincingly. “So you really believe that God sent that man to do his bidding on Earth?” I needle Mr. P, who is a non-practicing but still devout Catholic.
“Of course,” he says.
“You really believe that?”
“The process for selecting the Pope is very thorough,” Mr. P says.
I watch the elderly white man, now wearing a papal tiara, being carried down the church aisle. “How come God only sends white men from Europe?”
I switch the television to the New York Giants-Washington Redskins game and start Googling things about “Catholic” and “Bible” and “football,” because I am suddenly curious about what the Pope would have to say about football. It appears that the Pope doesn’t have much to say about football, although he seems to like soccer, but I did find a website that listed biblical verses that could be interpreted as taking a stance on the holiness of football, like this:
Six days work shall be done, but on the seventh day you shall have a Sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord. Whoever does any work on it shall be put to death. — Exodus 35:2
Can “solemn rest” be defined as watching these Samsons use their bodies as battering rams in vainglorious pursuit of fame and triumph? Maybe I should put PBS back on.
In relation to the Bible and football, the website also found this verse to be relevant:
When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity. Deuteronomy 25:11-12
Funny, I think the NFL has the same rule.
