Article

Change

Character

Sport

30 January 2025

5 min read

Rugby teaches how to live for others

The unseen players, doing unseen work, witness a truth of a content life.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A muddy rugby player carries equipment off a pitch.

Quino Al on Unsplash.

It’s a Tuesday evening and I’ve got my face in the dirt, as usual.

About two years ago I rejoined a local rugby team for the first time since I was a teenager, and this is the result, a particularly brutal training exercise involving press ups, tackle bags, intricate running patterns, and repetitive sets. The coaches push us hard on a Tuesday so that by Saturday we can perform the same tasks at a slower speed than we knock them out in training.

Although there are the occasional jokes about the coaches’ sadistic temperaments, there is no complaining or easing off. We’re locked in on the pain of preparation for the real thing.

It’s obvious to list the individual benefits the training brings; remembering I have a body after a long day pastoring people’s spiritual needs, physical fitness, strength and conditioning. Even if these benefits seem outweighed when you get bashed up! But I have noticed that nobody is motivated primarily by these. It is the ability to be there for your mate that motivates the lads to be gluttons for punishment, the need to be fit enough to do the dirty work so the team can succeed.

At almost any time in a game of rugby, half the team are doing things that you don’t see. There is almost no glory in playing in certain positions, you never make highlights reels or win player-of-the-match. Your only success is the team’s success. No perfect bind on a scrum, well timed clear out at a ruck, or perfect positioning in defence ever makes a highlights reel.

Dan Cole is a bit of a local hero in my patch, playing over three hundred times for my team, the Leicester Tigers, and winning well over a hundred caps for England, third on the all-time list. Because of his position, playing prop, and his particular skillset, he is famous for almost never being noticed, he has scored just four international tries and never, as far as I could see, been named man-of-the-match. In fact, he was widely teased by teammates and opponents for daring to score a try for Tigers over the Christmas period. (He shoved the ball over from a yard out- not a glorious finish).

Cole doesn’t trundle around the rugby pitch for his own glory, but understands that the best gift he can give is to prefer the team to himself, doing those quiet, unseen bits of the game he excels at. After all, you don’t win all those caps without being good at something, even if most of us don’t even notice what it is.

Nothing tests my ability to die to self than when I’m flat on my back after tackling or being tackled and I need to spring up.

When I was thinking of getting back into playing, I wondered when I opened the clubhouse door, what I would find. Within half an hour of my first session I had joined the band of brothers, nicknamed ‘Rev’ forever, expected immediately to grasp the objective of working for others just as they worked for me, despite being a newbie who spent most of the time getting in the way.

Because of this, I have found the two parts of my life - trainee priest and distinctly average rugby player - to fit neatly together. What I preach in the pulpit on a Sunday and try to demonstrate throughout the week about the spiritual life is demanded from my physicality on a Saturday afternoon. Jesus called his disciples to die to their own desires so that they could better serve the needs of others: with the kicker being that in this service, true joy, happiness and contentment will be found.

This is perhaps the heart of the Christian message, that loving, genuine, service of others is so close to God’s heart that it is impossible not to find wholeness in living this way. It seems to be a lesson that has been unconsciously heeded in the sport I play; nothing tests my ability to die to self than when I’m flat on my back after tackling or being tackled and I need to spring up quickly for the next phase of the game. Or chasing the play from one end of the field to another at the end of the game to get back into the line to defend. Or a man mountain running at you with the ball, and you’re desperate not to let your end of the bargain down with your teammates by failing to tackle him.

No doubt the language for thinking about these self-sacrifices for the team given to me by my faith is helpful. But I have found the opposite to be true too. Having experienced the joy of this service to my teammates, it strengthens the value of putting my own desires aside for the good of those who need my support. When at inconvenient times family members, friends, or congregants need a meal, a visit, some advocacy, or simply to be listened to, my spirit has been strengthened for this work by the experience of playing rugby and being part of a team.

The spiritual training I undertake; reading the Bible, prayer, and confession, and the physical training; those beastly Tuesday evening sessions, are all preparation for making the choice of sacrifice over selfishness in the moments when it counts, on and off the pitch. My body and soul are learning the same lessons from multiple sources and coming to the same conclusion: serving teammates- on the rugby pitch and in life- is the way to contentment. Even more so if we find some of those teammates hard to love.

As the Six Nations rolls round again this weekend, we will see plenty of skill and flair from the players in certain positions who have certain gifts. But watch closely, and those players whose work you cannot see are the crucial cogs in the machine which the flair players gloss. Those unseen players, doing unseen work, teach the truth of a content life, whether they know it or not.

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Column

Character

Comment

2 May 2024

4 min read

How to react in an era of social media outrage

Media executions and the quality of mercy.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A man in a suit stands on a gallery above a cavernous space in which are rows of desk

Huw Edwards stands above the BBC news room.

BBC.

The story of Huw Edwards presents challenges to anyone who wonders how to respond appropriately. The news anchor is back, on the news agenda rather than presenting it, having resigned from the BBC on “medical advice”. In news terms, it seems a long time ago – nearly a year – when stories emerged that he had paid a teenager for what are blushingly called “explicit images”.

His departure, rather belatedly said to have been inevitable, follows disclosures that he has continued to draw a very handsome BBC salary during his suspension from duty – and one that the corporation would rather not still be paying when it publishes its annual review of figures shortly.

The difficulties come when, putting aside prurience and distaste, one scrutinises why exactly the life and career of Edwards have been ruined. The police wasted little time last year in concluding that there was no evidence that a criminal offence had been committed. All that is left is a salacious whiff and the knowledge that Edwards has suffered a depressive breakdown of some sort

But that’s more than enough to make a major story in the era of peak social-media faux outrage. Think Philip Schofield, life ruined by stupidly lying about a fling with a much younger colleague (of consenting age). Think Caroline Flack, a reality actor with demonstrable mental health issues, hounded to her suicide. Think even the internet-sleuthing landslide that threatens to cover and suffocate comic Richard Gadd’s “true story” Netflix movie, Baby Reindeer.

While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

So how to respond to the Edwards resignation? The question supposes that we must indeed respond and that might contain the principal point. A senior news anchor with the BBC is a public figure. As such, he (or she) needs to be trusted by the public. Consequently, Edwards is called to a higher standard of behaviour than that of his invisible viewers.

Serious people in serious jobs need to be taken seriously. And anyone caught with their pants down, literally or figuratively, cannot look serious.

Yet that still doesn’t supply us with a response (beyond “don’t be an idiot”). Actually, it rather complicates matters. It’s easier if a crime has been committed, because we can take refuge in justice, reparation for the victim and punishment for the perpetrator. None of this seems to be available in Edwards’ case.

Some will reach for forgiveness under these circumstances. But that’s insufficient, since for most of us Edwards has done nothing more than read the news off an autocue and speak for the nation during royal events.

We risk disempowering a real victim if we forgive on their behalf, so it’s inadequate to talk only of forgiveness in this circumstance. While forgiveness liberates the forgiver (rather than necessarily the one being forgiven), Christians need to be wary of using forgiveness as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified.

In any event, forgiveness is a quality of compassion, the latter being the virtue to which we might most usefully aspire in response to the circumstances in which Edwards suffers. The root meaning of compassion is “to suffer with”, as in to share and, in doing so, profoundly to understand the suffering of another. In popular parlance, it might be to walk a mile in their boots.

To view the media execution of Edwards with compassion is to walk a mile in his boots and to accept, with humility, that we can be as fallible as him. Vitally, this is to show mercy rather than pity. The latter is filtered through human experience – Pieta is a Renaissance artistic meme, which invariably shows the Virgin Mary’s essential humanity at the deposition of her son from the cross.

By contrast, “the quality of mercy is not strained” in this way through our mortal experience. It’s universal and unqualified. Shakespeare’s famous line is given to Portia in The Merchant of Venice. One of the things it tells us is that to pity is human, but to be merciful is divine.

It’s from theological, cardinal virtues that mercy flows. But it’s born of compassion, which has its Christological source in the suffering (or Passion) of Christ, in which the human condition – sin, frailty, pain, death – is shared with the divine.

That’s a worldview that holds Huw Edwards in its gaze. It’s a wholly loving gaze that seeks to share his despair and failure, which is the ultimate act of compassion. Edith Cavell, the nurse who was shot as a spy in Flanders in the First Word War, came very close to it when she said before her execution: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”

Edwards doesn’t (literally) face a firing squad, so direct comparison is invidious. But our response might still be a compassionate one. We may not be able to walk a mile in his boots. But we can try.