I’ll begin with a confession: my first experience with golf was illegal. I grew up in an apartment complex in Houston, Texas. Across the street was a country club with a golf course. Before and after golfers played the course, my friends and I used to sneak onto the fairway of one hole to play football.
The people running the club noticed our clandestine activities and erected a chain-link fence around the course. Thus ended my golf engagement for many years.
When God called our family to pastor First Baptist Church in Midland, Texas, I took up the game of golf so as to spend time with staff colleagues and church members who played. The local country club allowed clergy to play for free on Thursdays. I could never have afforded the dues to be a member of the club, but I could pretend to be one on Thursdays because of their largesse.
Our next pastorate was in Atlanta, Georgia. One Sunday morning, a member of the congregation—who was also a former governor of the state—asked if I would care to attend the Masters. I thought, fasted, and prayed about his invitation for about a millisecond before accepting.
He loaned me his clubhouse badge, which allowed a companion and me to attend the tournament and even enter the players’ clubhouse. One year, Greg Norman held the door for us, thinking we were someone special.
My back condition has prevented me from playing golf for many years now, but it has not diminished my fascination with the game. I watch most weekends on television when I get the chance. And I put the Masters on my calendar every year. Watching “a tradition unlike any other,” as it’s called, is an annual tradition for me.
Therein lies my point.
Where concessions are cheap and cellphones are prohibited
In The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis has a demonic tempter explain to his apprentice:
The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, [God] (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as he has made eating pleasurable.
But since he does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end of itself, he has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together in the very world he has made, by the union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immortal theme.
This insight of rhythm and change is nowhere more articulated in my experience than at Augusta National.
I have been privileged to attend the Masters several years, and each time, it was the same experience. The concessions are still amazingly inexpensive; the merchandise is still extremely popular (and available for purchase only at the tournament); the holes are still named for flowers selected by descendants of the original landowner of the property. Cellphones are still prohibited, a fact that caused even a thirteen-time PGA winner to be dismissed from the grounds this week.
Watching the tournament on television, it seems that nothing has changed from thirty years ago when I first walked the course.
And yet, it is different every year in all the ways true to athletic competition. No golfer plays the course the same way each day, much less each year. Only three times in the tournament’s long history has a golfer won it in consecutive years. Every shot is new to that moment. Every day is a day that has never been before and will never be again.
The sameness and change Screwtape described exist in a symbiotic relationship at the Masters in a way that is especially timeless and timely.
Why is this reality so resonant in my soul?
The shift “from screens to sanctuaries”
One of the most interesting facts about religious life in the West these days is the resurgence in attendance among the most traditional of Christian expressions.
CBS News reports that “Catholic Church attendance is rising, with the number of young people at Mass ‘way up.’” The New York Times headlines: “Orthodox pews are overflowing with converts.” A priest said about the surge of young men drawn to the church’s demanding traditions, “In the whole history of the Orthodox Church in America, this has never been seen.” The conservative Anglican Church in North America has grown by 12.2 percent.
One analyst explains: Children have been warned about climate disaster for years; social media has pummeled adolescents with misinformation; political leaders are less trusted than ever; rising home prices are leaving many behind; school shootings, a global pandemic, and skyrocketing college tuition add to “the increasingly complex and shaky nature of the foundation upon which young Americans were taught to stand.”
By contrast, traditional religious institutions and practices offer a compelling source of solidarity amid the chaos. This shift “from screens to sanctuaries” tells us something about the depth of anxiety in our day but also about the “God-shaped emptiness” we seek to fill.
How to “discern his presence in the midst of the noise”
I would be the last person to advocate conflating golf with worship and attending the Masters with attending church services. But I do think their similarities point to something significant about our souls.
From weekly worship to daily spiritual disciplines such as prayer, Bible study, solitude, fasting, and meditation, we were made for God and made for the rhythms by which we experience him with personal intimacy. As Dr. Ryan Denison notes in his latest Daily Article, when we engage in these practices with our hearts focused on our Father, we “discern his presence in the midst of the noise” in our lives.
From the hushed beauty of Augusta National to the quiet of a room behind a closed door (Matthew 6:6), the divine presence is as close as our knees and as powerful as his omnipotence. Our Father calls us today to “be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).
When was the last time you accepted his invitation?
Denison Forum
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