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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Character

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17 April 2024

5 min read

Work isn’t working, it’s killing us

We mistake the nature of work and our purpose within it.

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

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

Two people sit beside each other working on laptops, One looks askance to the other who frowns.

Resume Genius on Unsplash.

What is work for? In our individualist society we perhaps might zoom in on the minutiae of the specific role that we fulfil. Work is for the success of the company I work for, work is for building up my CV, work is to earn money enough to live, work is for seeing people I don’t have to live with. But what about work? The burden that humans have always had to gather enough resources to provide for themselves. We are mistaking the nature of work and our purpose within it, and it is beginning to kill us.

Each of the recent generations have had different, and askew, attitudes to their work. Baby boomers- those who got a job and a sensible haircut in the 60s, conceived work as a contract. They worked well at almost anything and the reward was home ownership, resources to provide for a family, and saving for leisure. The purpose of their work is the lifestyle it creates. To some extent, their successors in Gen X had the same perception and the same contract- stick at any industry and the reward will be generous enough to make the graft worth it.

But what happens when that contract is broken? When work no longer leads to those rewards? The Millennial answer is to seek out work that gives purpose, to accept the reward will not be fulfilling and so to find the purpose in the end of the work itself. Even if that means a lifetime of renting and scrimping, because the reward is not to be found in the payment.

A slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage.

The Gen Z answer to this broken contract is the most fascinating of all; a reluctance to work at all. There is ‘quiet quitting’ whereby you do as little as possible whilst remaining employed, ‘bare minimum Mondays,’ and, of course, ‘lazy girl jobs.’ The purported aim of this generation is to find jobs where they can work from home, do almost nothing, and still receive a generous salary. Others are living the ‘soft life.’ They move in with mum and dad (usually boomers who have run the rat race and received the benefits of the contract) and do something creative part-time, earning little but doing little. It's a bit of the old baby boomer attitude seeking pleasure outside work but without the corresponding work ethic or career mindset.

On top of this is the mental health crisis, which prevents many of Gen Z from working, with one in three non-graduates out of work with mental health conditions. Bosses receive calls from parents of those in their 20s explaining that their children are too unwell to work.

I suggest that these things are linked, and a slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage. We must look outside ourselves to understand what work was created for. In Genesis, the Christian origin story, God conceives work as a place of dignity and purpose. What Adam and Eve did in the garden mattered- they were the leaders of creation, and God even gave them the responsibility of naming other creatures. Humans were made to have responsibility, made to express this in their work. Even in the drudgery of repeated physical, administrative, or household tasks, we have the freedom to find purpose. We can take pleasure and pride in making things, fixing things, restoring things, even if just to the state they were in when we cleaned last week.

Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself.

The ‘quiet quitting’ of Gen Z or the dry contract of the boomers will not cut it. Even in jobs we don’t like, or tasks we find overwhelming, the same reframing is needed, perhaps even more so. Work itself brings purpose, and that is worth giving our whole selves to, otherwise listlessness and sadness will get us. We were made to find purpose and joy in the task of whatever is in front of us, no matter how simple.

Millennials have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Yes, this generation have found the importance of purpose in their work. But only in work that has an end outside of itself. Work has been created with an internal, permanent purpose. Suggesting that meaning only comes from employment with obvious altruistic ends means that any other kind of work, domestic or employed, is devoid of this meaning. The same listlessness ensues in any role not found to have such an end.

St Paul elevates work explicitly even beyond this created place of purpose. In his letter to a church in Colossae, he writes, ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.’ In other words, work is an act of worship, acting as if the task we are completing is for God, and putting the requisite effort in.

Of course, this is a massive challenge. How many of us put as much work in to satisfy our bosses as we would if they were the ultimate director of our eternal destiny? But it does redeem those moments where we wonder what the point of what we’re doing is, who will see it, and if it is really worth doing properly at all. God sees. God knows. And that makes it worth doing properly.

Paul also makes it clear here that work is not just what we get paid for. Work is everything we do that is not rest. Whatever we do - employed, at home, inrelation to our families. And this allows those who cannot work, in an employment sense, to take part in God’s purpose for humanity by working in a way in which they can. Whether it’s caring for a relative, nurturing a tiny veg patch, creating a piece of art, or hoovering the carpet. Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself. Do it as if God were watching. And feel yourself become more human.