Going to the Gym with God (Part 7): On Exercise and Koinonia

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In a passing scene in the classic 1989 film, Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating leads a group of young men out onto the soccer pitch for their first practice. If you’ve never seen it or perhaps forget this gem of a film, Mr. Keating is the larger-than-life English teacher whose “seize the day” philosophy is lighting fires among the students and wreaking havoc with the administration at a stuffy New England prep school called Welton Academy. Played by Robin Williams, Mr. Keating does not strike an imposing figure as an athlete, but as he leads his team out onto the field, he shares with them his philosophy of sport.

“Now devotees may argue that one sport is inherently better than another. For me, sport is actually a chance for us to have other human beings push us to excel.”

He then leads his team through one of the most unorthodox soccer practices they’ve every experienced, reciting lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Joys,” while they kick soccer balls to the strains of Handel’s “Water Music Suite No 2, in D Major.”

I have shared in a previous post how fraught my own journey with athletics has been over the years. As a child, I never felt I belonged on the ice, the court, or the field. I was rather clumsy as a kid, and never had enough interest in sports to take the time to learn how to do a proper lay-up. I broke my arm at the start of my grade 7 year, and so I missed almost 3 months of gym class in that formative season of my life. In my high school years—I confess this now to my chagrin—attendance in gym class was not closely monitored and I skipped more classes than I attended. The result of all this was a growing narrative that I lived by, that sports were not for me. I was an artist (I told myself), not the athlete.

Of course, as Mr. Keating so powerfully reminds us, those two fields of human endeavor—the arts and athletics—are hardly at odds with one another. Properly understood, at least, they need not be.

When I started my teaching career, back in 1997, I was tapped to coach the senior girls high school basketball team. In those days, they might as well have tapped me to coach the open-heart-surgery-society, I knew so little about the sport. But what I found, as I poured myself into the task, was that Keating’s philosophy rang true. Coaching basketball became an opportunity to have other human beings (in this case, a team of 14 teenaged human beings) push me to excel.

I would get to work around 6:30 in the morning and practice my three-point shot for a full hour, almost every morning. This was because I knew that however well I avoided it, a time would come when I would be required to make a shot, as the team’s coach. And I didn’t want that time to be a dead give-away that I had no clue what I was doing.

The time came, by the way. It was the exhibition game between the senior basketball teams, boys and girls, versus the teachers; the whole school had turned out to cheer their classmates on, and that’s when it happened. I dropped down low on the post, and then moved back behind the three-point line, ready for a pass. The head of the phys-ed department was bringing the ball down the court and feed it to me. And like I had practiced every morning since November, I put up the ball, with a prayer on my lips, and before the entire assembled student body of our school, the most satisfying “swoosh” I’ve ever heard rang out over the gym.

That may have been the day I started to rethink the artist/athlete dichotomy I had been living by.

Not long after that I discovered the sport of squash, which is now adays my game of choice. For almost a decade now, I’ve had a standing Thursday morning squash match with a good friend (one of the losses I’m grieving during Covid is not having been able to play for almost a year).

When I started squash, I was all heart and little skill on the court, but once again, Keating’s dictum proved true. Playing once a week with a great partner has pushed me to excel. It’s built my endurance, my determination, my mental toughness, all of which are qualities that carry over into other domains of my life. More importantly, it’s given me the kind of friendship in my life that you can only form when you are pushing another human being to test their limits, while they, in turn, push you in the same way.

All of this is a round-about way of getting at my topic for today’s addition to the “theology of exercise” we’ve been working on here at terra incognita for the last few months. Besides its health benefits, exercise builds community. It certainly does when it’s done together, and even when your exercise of choice is a solo sport, to pursue it well, you have to step into a community of like-minded afficionados of the sport, who can help you to grow as you go.

There is something about physically exerting ourselves with other human beings—having them push us to excel—that binds us to them in a unique way.

In this, I think, exercising together is a helpful metaphor for church life. The Bible often uses the term koinonia to describe the mysterious spiritual bond that binds people together in the community of the church. Koinonia means “fellowship,” or “partnership” (originally it was a term that referred to business partners in the ancient world). When I think of times I’ve experienced real koinonia in the church, however, the bond was not unlike that connection I feel with my squash partner, when we step out onto the court to push each other to the limit for an hour or so.

Maybe there’s even more than a metaphor in there. Given the argument I’ve been making in this series, that our bodies and our spirits are intricately interwoven, and that what happens to us physical affects us spiritually and vice versa, perhaps one way to build koinonia in the church is just to encourage the community to do physical activity together every once in a while.

Kononia, mind you, is a gift of the Holy Spirit, that comes to us only if and as we are focused on Christ, serving and worshiping him together; so I don’t want that last paragraph to suggest that “exercise” could ever serve as a replacement to that. But even so, when I look back over times when I felt most bonded to the other Christians in my life, there was usually some sort of physical activity happening together, as part of our community life: setting up and tearing down a school gym for our church plant to use in its worship—playing games together with the campers at Bible camp—volunteering together at the church to fix, renovate, or construct something.

These things are all, to borrow from Mr. Keating, opportunities to have other human beings push us to excel. And to borrow a term from the New Testament, if it’s done in the Lord, and for the joy of knowing him, these things are also opportunities to form rich bonds of koinonia between us as we do them together.

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