Finding Faith in Fantasy Football
October 18 2019
Faith is not an intellectual exercise, basically by its own definition. It is, in reflection, interesting that I decided to try and describe my journey to faithfulness from an intellectual perspective, with the inherent flaws of this approach helpfully pointed out in several astute responses. Firstly: that the development of faith and other spiritual qualities isn’t an intellectual exercise that can be achieved in the abstract through study; one must inevitably get their hands dirty in the messiness of everyday life. Secondly, and most crucially: surely it is not possible to come to a place of faith through a logical, rational process.
Medium is full of stories from very intelligent, logical, rationally minded people who are questioning, losing or outright hostile to their previous conceptions of faith. Similarly, when trawling the internet for Bahá’í-inspired blogs, I have found several instances of seemingly logical and rational minded people who were once followers of the Faith, likely for similar logical and rational reasons as I outlined, but who have wound up bitter and disillusioned.
What leads people to this place? I know that I am in no place to be judgemental about any of these people, not least because someone very close to me has gone through a similar process. But also because, if you fully commit to this faith thing, you know that it isn’t really up to us whether we are granted it or not. And there down the rabbit hole goes logic…
Thus, I can see now that to outline an intellectual-driven journey to faith is a bit misleading — a good early lesson in the dilemmas of a writer, that narrative creation is a delicate dance with the truth. It would be more accurate to say that I found the Bahá’í perspective an enticing explanation — essentially an academic theory — for the repeated emergence of religion in human history, one that was more life-affirming and a bit less condescending than the uniqueness of our species for ‘myth-making’ (a theory put forward by Yuval Noah Harari and many other very smart and not remotely smug atheists like my former self).
In short, this perspective served to initially persuade me on the legitimacy of religion, and it still informs my belief of what it means to be a Bahá’í. But it didn’t mean I truly believed it — or for that matter, believed in God.
I think by this stage in my life I was just starting to give genuine weight to the idea of an all-encompassing intelligent power beyond human perception. With an essentially useless Honours degree in Forensic Science under my belt, along with a growing interest in yoga and meditation, I was increasingly looking outward to more progressive and holistic scientific explanations of the world.
I found evidence that the world is connected in a non-local way, where time and space are irrelevant. That there is an underlying field of information that links everything, and that certain states of minds, certain substances, certain physical practices, certain utterances, allow us to access and influence it. It could be called, as the great Eastern sages did, the Akashic: an omnipresent, all-penetrating existence, described here by the Indian Yogi Swami Vivekananda (1):
“It is the Aksaha that become the air, that become the liquids, that becomes the solids; it is the Akasha that becomes the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the stars, the comets; it is the Akasha that becomes the human body, the animal body, the plants, every form that we see, everything that can be sensed, everything that exists… At the beginning of creation there is only this Akasha. At the end of the cycle the solid, the liquids, and the gases all melt into the Akasha again, and the next creation similarly proceeds out of this Akasha…”
I like the poetry of this explanation, and the purpose and reassurance it gives. No action is worthless, no thought is lost: everything remains, everything accumulates, and everything informs the future. Maybe not in our cycle, maybe not before the universe collapses in on itself (or whatever the current scientific theory is), but for when it reemerges again from this field, which remains, but now has more to share with, teach and inspire those who succeed in their search to access it — an everlasting journey of material life towards increasing complexity and consciousness. You don’t even have to call it God, although you still could.
So the idea of God was fine, finally. God was, in fact, perfectly logical! That is, as this underlying field of information, the source and destination of all actions and information: as the Akashic. I could get my head around that. But it is the explicitly religious interpretation of this concept, when the Akashic has agency and an agenda — when a hand emerges from this field, into our material world, and starts actively intervening in our affairs when it feels necessary, or perhaps when we ask it to — where things becoming challenging.
I still find it difficult to get my head around the full implications of a religious God. That an all knowing, all powerful being — sorry, Being — watches us, knows us, despairs in us, and at the last moment, intervenes, sends down the essence of itself in human form, and alters our trajectory, reorientates us, has enough love to save us when there is no apparent need for it to, as It will still continue on, unchanged, forever, regardless. That we should have faith in this fact, and have faith that this help will always be there, especially when we ask for it.
I imagine this God might be more logical if its existence is gradually instilled in your mind as you are developing your own framework for understanding the world. It seems something less easy to get your head around, once your head has already developed around a defined worldview. You need events that actually challenge this established worldview, and that over time and after much reflection leave this worldview substantially wanting. Events that are so specific, so unique to your life, so seemingly unlikely and ridiculous, illogical, that they make you pause and reassess… but, at the same time, are still explainable, potentially coincidental, meaning that you still have to consciously make that leap of faith yourself.
If I could isolate one example, one particularly strong breeze of divine confirmation that lifted me into the current of faith, one particular occurrence wholly unique to my life and arising in the most illogical of places, it would be, of all things, fantasy football.
Fantasy football (that is, football of the Australian rules variety) is something that a group of us, including my high school friends, have for a long time taken very seriously.
Fantasy football works on many levels. It makes watching footy more interesting — makes some games worth watching at all. Creates a deeper storyline behind individual players. Provides a fantastic source of banter between friends. Harmless fun, for the most part.
For a lucky few, you can also win stuff. For a very select few, you might win officially: weekly prizes, or even a car. For the rest, it’s cash. Cash that pays two ways: not just in hand, but knowing that it came out of your mate’s. For groups like us, who do take it seriously, it can end up being a fair bit. Especially when you are stone cold broke.
Some background: I started my PhD on March 2011, on a 3 year scholarship, $30,000 tax free a year. Almost drowning in cash when you have spent the last 4 or so years living the student life in share houses. Come July 2014, including a 3 month extension, I was still drowning, but now hopelessly in my thesis. I had some savings, but not a lot. I tried for a completion scholarship: 3 lots of $2000 over four months, at the start, middle and end. I didn’t get it, and with good reason: I didn’t end up submitting for another year, with my final resubmission and acceptance another year after that.
I then caught a small break; I managed to score a few tutorials and lectures from my supervisor, who was on the road to retirement, along with some casual research work to get my foot in the academic door. Not that the door was particularly enticing. In my own universe of first world problems, things were pretty dire: broke, single, aimless, borderline unemployed. The fact that fantasy footy was pretty much the only excitement in my life is a good demonstration of that.
This was my first evidence that the universe does indeed work in mysterious ways. You could say, because I needed the cash more than anyone else, and I had the time on my hands and my hands on a keyboard, the odds were on my side to win. You might be right. But that would also be a misrepresentation of fantasy footy. There is some science behind it — it rewards those with diligence and patience in particular — but when it comes to the crunch, you are at the hands of the fantasy gods.
Despite all my research, I should have lost my preliminary final, but for an absolute shocker of a game from one of my opponent’s best players. So I won: not just once but in two leagues. Two cash leagues, each with $1000 for the winner. $100 for the loser (you don’t play fantasy footy to come second). And the final kicker, I was playing the same bloke in both leagues: double or pretty much nothing.
I won’t take you through the specifics, but it was ridiculous how it unfolded, this series of otherwise random events connected in a very specific way in my life — the combined statistics of the 18 assorted AFL players that were unique to our two teams. Players were withdrawn from the selected teams at the last minute; players scored wildly below or above their averages. All weekend it looked like I was gone, then on Sunday, things fell into place. It was never in doubt.
It didn’t solve all my problems. It wasn’t a miracle by any stretch. But it was enough. In hindsight, anything more or less wouldn’t have done the trick. It was the first evidence that God was looking out for me. That God would find me, even (or especially) in the most unlikeliest of places. Best of all, that God might just also have a brilliant sense of humour.
This mode of writing seems most orientated towards those without faith in God, rather than those with it: generally as a vain attempt to convince them otherwise. However, when I decided I was going to write about my faith, I also decided that it was not my purpose to convince anyone into finding theirs. So with that in mind, a final note to the ‘faithful’ reading this, including myself.
Just how ridiculous these events outlined above are is a matter of perspective, and I certainly can’t do them complete justice here, or the impact they had on me. I went through a stage in my life where I was easily awed, and these events fell in this period. The honeymoon has certainly worn off now, and it is rare that I experience such moments (perhaps not surprising, since more than a few were substance-assisted).
But even relatively recently, there have been instances where things that I found incredibly profound — signs of eery alignment across time and space — seemed to people of long held and established faith merely logical acknowledgments of a basic and self-evident truth. I felt grateful that I was able to see the inherent wonder in such cosmic synchronicity, when perhaps others may have lost it. Not to mention those who lose their faith altogether.
I’m sure there are pros and cons of having found faith yourself as opposed to being, for want of a better term, born into it. While the years preceding this intervention of faith were the darkest of my life, perhaps I am able to better make use of it, to better appreciate it, having seen this darkness that is its absence.
Hopefully I never grow to take my faith for granted, and I hope that you never do either.
1) Ervin Laszlo, 2004. “Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything”.