Saints and Sinners: Finding God on the golf course
In John Tidyman’s popular book, “Cleveland Golfer’s Bible” (Gray & Company, 2002), the author has a chapter titled, “Why I Love Playing Golf with Women.”
One of the reasons he gives is that women “rarely swear.” With men golfers, it’s different. Over the course of 18 holes, they may invoke the name of the deity more than a minister does in church on a Sunday morning.
The men, however, will insist they mean no disrespect. They will go even further. They will claim they feel closer to God on the golf course on Sunday morning, while enjoying the wonderful world of nature.
I have always been skeptical of such claims. Of course, it is possible — as Shakespeare said — to find “tongues in trees, books in running brooks and sermons in stones.” But stones by themselves do not a sermon make, nor a hole-in-one on Sunday a Christian make.
Still, wanting to put the golfer’s creed to the test, I decided one lovely spring morning to skip church and spend the time outdoors. I wanted to see whether it was possible to feel closer to God while communing with nature, rather than crowded in a pew.
The Bible, I reminded myself, speaks more of woods and trees and woodland creatures than of synagogues and churches. In the Bible, we read of lying down in green pastures, of still waters, of the fields exulting and the woods singing for joy. The glory of nations is compared to an overflowing stream and peace to a river.
So, I stepped out of a world of stone and asphalt and automobile emissions into a world of trees and wildflowers and babbling brooks. The contrast gets one to realize that we spend most of our lives not in the world of God’s making, but in one of our own making that has all the ambience of a trash-burning plant.
In his book “The End of Nature” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), Bill McKibbin states that we may soon be looking for answers in the great god, Dacron, as opposed to finding faith in the God that has been our spiritual leader for thousands of years. In a world of Astroturf, he writes, there may still be work for God to do, but He will be unable to speak to us through nature.
With church bells pealing in the distance I sat down on a rock and cooled my bare feet in a running stream and read “The Golfer’s Prayer for Forgiveness,” which appears on page 211 in “The Golfer’s Bible”:
“Forgive me, O Lord, if Sunday morning finds me on the golf course and not in church. Forgive me if I find You, not in prayers and hymns, but in Your great and glorious outdoors, more magnificent than any cathedral.
“My prayers to You on Sunday morning may be unspoken and my hymns to You unsung, but my heart will be always praising You for the beauty of the Earth, for spacious skies, for the joys of comradeship and for this funny little game we play.
“Bless my driving and my putting. Direct the ball into the bunker only for my opponent’s shots. (If to ask this is unworthy of me, forgive me this, too.) Amen.”
It may be unrealistic to expect your ordinary duffer to be thinking thoughts about nature and the universe as he steps up to the first tee on a Sunday morning.
But if he takes a minute to pray “The Golfer’s Prayer for Forgiveness” before he leaves the clubhouse, he may indeed find his 18-hole journey chasing an elusive little white ball across one tiny corner of God’s glorious creation to be a religious experience such as he would not find in church. Or anywhere else.
George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.