Golf as a Spiritual, No, Bodily Game
Wondering why some see a union between the game and the spirit
People say to me that golf is a spiritual game. I don’t believe I understand how that word applies to golf. According to my dictionary, the first meaning of spiritual is “Of the spirit or the soul as distinguished from the body.”
It is true that golf is a game in which you seem to get in touch with higher parts of yourself. We can say golf is spiritual in that respect. But we can’t leave the body out of the golf swing, can we?
—Harvey Penick, And If You Play Golf, You’re My Friend, 45
This meditation from Penick on the nature of the game is short, yet rich. We wonder: is golf a spiritual game? Many would say, yes, of course it is. But Penick does us a service by clarifying to a degree the meaning of this designation. Certainly, it can’t mean, as he insinuates, something unrelated to the body. Golf is clearly an embodied activity. It is suffused with the reality and implications of our embodiment. From our walking, our swinging, our being with others, to the very tactile environs of the course and how this all affects us, the whole thing is an incarnated reality. It is of the flesh.
And yet—and this is what I think Penick is getting at—the game, as he says, helps you “get in touch with the higher parts of yourself.” It seems that these “higher parts” are what people have in mind when they call golf a spiritual game.
What are these “higher parts”? The intellect, soul, self, heart, will, one’s character? Probably all of these things, depending on our meaning and understanding of them. Those things that can be enriched, elevated, actualized, or, conversely, impoverished, deadened, and corrupted. That of us of ultimate weight.
Just how the game enables us to access these realities is a topic for another post. It’s a big question. But, really, the question of how golf is a spiritual yet embodied game is one that ultimately regards the nature of the human person as such.
And it’s an age-old consideration at that. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, even Penick, to name only a few, have grappled with the tension—harmony?—within us as embodied persons that seem also to have something about us that goes “beyond” the body. Though at the same time wondering at this something as intimately—perhaps essentially—united to that body.
Thoughts?