20 Mar (March) Madness for the Soul
This is one of the happiest weeks of the year for a lot of Americans, which may be a serious problem, but I would like to be sympathetic to them, because this week is pretty high on my list of good weeks as well. It’s tournament time, and if you don’t know which tournament, shame on you.
We found out on Selection Sunday where our favorites landed, or didn’t land, and for the last several days, the bulk of the American working class, non-working class, and too-rich-to-still-be-working class have spent hours of their work days predicting how it will all pan out. I’ve never had a single job where people didn’t have brackets lying around the office or the shop this time of year, and I think that’s an abundantly good thing. It helps people play at work, which should happen a lot more often in my opinion. But I digress.
I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t watch college basketball until March Madness strikes because, interestingly enough, there’s something about filling out that bracket for your office pool or for ESPN, or for that one where Warren Buffett gives you $1 billion for filling out a perfect bracket–there’s something about filling out that bracket that suddenly makes you care who wins, and every game becomes a big deal. It’s amazing that when we lean into something, even with as little action as filling out a bracket, that our affections start to get involved. We start to engage people around something outside of ourselves, and we laugh about how we predicted that huge upset simply because the underdog’s mascot suited our fancy, and we start to care about teams and coaches and players, and we get legitimately upset at real people for making bad refereeing decisions. It’s just crazy. But it’s awesome.
That’s one thing bracketology can teach our souls. Lean into something, move towards it with only the slightest bit of action, and our affections will start to get involved. That’s true of relationships and how we engage culture and how we work and I could go on and on.
And here’s the other thing: I find it fascinating how much “fairy story” talk there is surrounding March Madness. Cinderella teams, fairy tale endings, miraculous plays, etc. The truth is, sports is one of the primary venues people flock to in order to find the magical, the other-worldly, the transcendent. And that’s actually a good thing. Granted, our society has more invested in sports than sports could ever return to society, and it could be one of the things that not only points to, but also enables our society’s destruction (not to be too apocalyptic). But our destruction will only be a symptom of a good desire that has been misappropriated. The fact that people turn to March Madness to find transcendence means that they are actually looking for it, and since most of them don’t know who Jesus really is, why would we expect them to look anywhere else but sports and sex and work and whatever else our culture binges on? Because there are tastes of the magical in those things too, and they will actually point us to the Deeper Magic if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.
So, you might as well move into this bracketology/March Madness thing. Everyone else is doing it, and maybe you can tell them all where the real magic is. Along the way, another Cinderella story might help you taste the real magic in a way you never have before.
–Jonathan Allston