Manson's Memo 3/7

Did you watch any of the curling in the Winter Olympics? I’ve never done it, so I certainly can’t criticize it. I understand it’s popular in Canada and some northern parts of the US (and other cold places). It’s sort of like shuffleboard on ice and with brooms. It appears to take great skill, because it involves pushing the rock with just enough speed to get it to stop where you want, and possibly to hit your opponents stone and knock it out of the bull’s-eye. It also takes great accuracy (which I think would be very hard on ice). It also takes skill by those using the brooms to speed it up or slow it down or whatever else they do with the brooms.

Like I said, it certainly looks like it requires great skill, but let’s face it, it looks very silly. Brooms don’t strike us as athletic equipment. And to see a couple people running along the ice sweeping in front of a gliding rock seems (to the uninitiated eye) pretty funny.

There are things in the life of the church that probably seem just as strange to some. The whole idea of prayer may seem to some people to be foolish or superstitious. Fasting during Lent (usually in the form of giving something up) seems like mush ado about nothing. Meeting at the Table to manifest the unity of the Church that is so visibly divided may look utterly nonsensical.

But those teams at the Olympics took what they were doing seriously, because they knew what they had put into the sport to get there. We too need to be ready to explain why it is the things we do aren’t as silly as some people may think.

שלןמ

(shalom)