Last month on a summer trip to Europe, my wife Kelly and I were strolling along the banks of the blue Danube in Budapest late in the evening. It was a beautiful night, with the city’s famed castle lit up in golden hues across the river, when suddenly we heard an arresting noise arise from off in the distance. Like a rushing wind, it whooshed into our ears—a cyclone of sound carrying over the water.
“What was that?” Kelly asked.
It lasted only for a few thrilling seconds, but whatever it was, it had a striking power, a fleeting beauty to it. It took a moment for me to orient myself to the sonic curiosity, then identify it: a multitude of elated voices, the exuberance of the human spirit unleashed.
“Soccer,” I said.
Apparently, thousands of avid European football fans were watching a Eurocup match live on television at a large outdoor venue a few miles away. Their team had evidently netted a crucial goal, and this remarkable sound was their unrehearsed response, a sublime and utter form of joy that traveled through the cool night air all the way to us from the far side of the river.
The elated sound of the soccer fans’ voices had an unusual spiritual quality to it. The language Luke used to describe Pentecost in the book of Acts came to mind as it echoed along the shore, then faded away. “When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place (when) suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven…” (Acts 2:2).
Bartlett Giamatti lived a rich intellectual life before passing away in 1989. He was a professor of English Renaissance literature who became the president of Yale University before taking on the role of president of baseball’s National League in 1986. He was then elevated to become the Commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1989 but served in the position only a few months before his death. (Giamatti, by the way, was also the father of actor Paul Giamatti.) As a gifted writer and a life-long baseball fan, Bart Giamatti had a way of expressing the beauty and importance of sports in a profoundly insightful way. In his charming book, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games, he wrote this:
Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate the sports experience with experience otherwise described as religious…(It) must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described—when first felt—as religious.
This strikes me as true. The mystical link between the thrill of victory and the spiritual feeling of elation most likely explains why the most famous of contests—the Olympic Games—began as a quasi-religious enterprise back in Greece around 800 BC. The games were held in a large, open-air religious sanctuary in the city of Olympia next to the Temple of Zeus, and recovered records reveal the Olympiad was held not just to honor victorious athletes and the city-states from which they came, but also the gods they worshiped.
Think of a moment in which you claimed victory in the past. Re-experience the feeling when you crossed the finish line or touched the side of the pool first. Or when you were present when your team or favorite athlete secured the championship trophy. Remember. Attend that feeling. It doesn’t seem unreasonable, does it, to at least consider the possibility that the brand of elation we experience in moments of athletic triumph might be an artifact, a pointer, a whisper given to us from above.
Paul, who so often reaches for racing and striving metaphors in his letters to the early church, seems to make this connection overt when he uses the term hypernikao in writing to the Romans. He describes those living out the way of Christ as not mere conquerors, like those blessed with a fleeting victory by Roman mythology’s goddess of Victory (Nike), but more than conquerors; more than victors. Hypernikao. He’s saying as wondrous as the experience of earthly victory is in the contests in which we participate—and they are wonderful—what God offers us, in the end, isn’t merely an ephemeral feeling of triumph but an eternal one. Yes, it’s a transcendent feeling, elation, but one that lasts and lasts and lasts.
Walking along the Danube a few weeks ago, I think we heard a hint of that. For a few seconds. From heaven. Or at least from across the water.
God—Thank you for the fleeting sounds of victory—a hint of the eternal.
