Take a Walk on the Golf Course with God

Here are a few reasons why I love golf. First, it’s outside and I enjoy being outside in natural settings. Even if you’re in the middle of town, even though the land has been scaped (why isn’t that a legit usage of the term?) you’re still walking on grass mostly, hitting around trees and over ponds, stomping and slashing in sand, searching and cursing in bushes and weeds. Much better than being inside, by and large, wouldn’t you agree? Second, I’m rather vain as a person, and golf enables me to feed my vanity even while “humbling” me. Don’t get me wrong, it does humble me a little; the same way I am currently feeling humbled by losing my 70th consecutive game of Settlers of Catan. But it’s the kind of humility that only makes me more driven to assert my authority and superiority. So in that sense it’s a demonic humility since its only purpose is to facilitate pride.

But the best reason why I love golf is the abundant and wonderful analogies to Life it lends itself to, particularly the Christian life. Though it really can apply quite well to a secular life also; I just tend to approach things like worldviews from a Christian perspective, or at least, as Christian a perspective as I am presently capable of applying. Which isn’t any great shakes, I might add; at least, not in respect to a true Christian perspective. Doubtless it would seem very Christian to a non-Christian not familiar with true Christianity. But for anyone who examines the life of Jesus on earth, or really any of the New Testament, or who has read Mere Christianity, my shortcomings in maintaining and even creating a Christ-like perspective will be glaringly apparent.

That, however, is beside the point I’m laboriously trying to make. I am reading Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf by Ben Hogan and Herbert Warren, illustrations by Anthony Ravielli. (Which is an ironic title since it was written in 1957; Hogan refers to old timers like Harry Vardon and Walter Hagen, whereas now we refer to old timers like, well, Ben Hogan.) Regardless, I finished the first chapter, the first fundamental, which is, in fact, rather fundamental: the Grip. Here’s how he ends the chapter:

As he improves, the average golfer will enjoy the game more and more, for a correct swing will enable him to rediscover golf—in fact, discover golf for the first time. He will have the necessary equipment, the full “vocabulary” for golf. He’s going to see a different game entirely…When he hits a poor shot and leaves himself with a difficult recovery, he’ll respond to the challenge of having to play a difficult shot extra well in order to make up for his error…He will feel this way about golf because he will know he has an essentially correct, repeating swing and that he can, with moderate concentration, produce the shot that is called for. He will make errors, of course, because he is human, but he will be a golfer and the game will be a source of ever-increasing pleasure for him. (35-36).

What struck me about this was the spiritual application that immediately leaped out of the page. As anyone who has come within shouting distance of me knows, I am going through a rather rough patch at the moment, with no full-time job, not enough money to pay the rent and bills, no prospect of what I’m going to do once my lease here is up, etc. And the Lord has been working me over pretty good with all this, speaking to me through the various books I’ve been reading (48 Days to the Work You Love by Dan Miller, Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning), the sermons at my church, the small group I’ve been attending, the experiences I’ve had like constant, repeated rejection, and my own inner turmoil. He has been trying to correct my spiritual grip, the fundamentals of my walk with Him, how I approach Him and how I approach my life. And this concept that Hogan explains in relation to golf, how having the basic Grip down and CORRECT is going to be vital in how the rest of the golf game, and the rest of the lessons, function. Once you have the essentials of any skill or method down, you can build on it, you can create variations on the original theme. But even more essential, you will have the confidence in yourself because you have the fundamentals down and you know that you can reproduce the same results consistently. Any golfer can hit a great shot by accident; what separates the pros from the joes is that the pros can reproduce the same swing, the same shot whenever they want. Because they know what the fundamentals of the shot are and have practiced them to the point where it’s second nature. Hogan has been hammering this point repeatedly in the introduction and first chapter.

So what the Lord has been doing to me is to correct some of the mistakes in my spiritual grip, to demonstrate what I’m doing wrong and how to solve it. Take, for example, money. If He had blessed me with a great fortune a year ago, it is very probable that the wealth would have gone to my head. I would have come to depend upon myself, to regard God as caretaker of my spirit and soul, while I handle the corporeal life until it ends. “No, Lord, you work on my struggles with Lust and Arrogance, I’ll just handle the finances. Money is so tawdry and materialistic; I don’t want someone as holy as You to concern yourself with such matters. It’s beneath You.” (Imagine this with a semi-haughty tone, worldly and hoity-toity. Shouldn’t be too hard; we all have that voice in our repertoire.) Well, after this little crisis, I’m not going to be so cavalier about money. When you’re on the brink of financial ruin for an extended period of time, some misapprehensions and misconceptions get shelved pretty quickly. Things like, “Oh, if I just have a college degree, I can always find a job,” or “God won’t ever let me get into too bad a financial straight, not if I’m honestly seeking Him.” Guess what, boobala? That’s exactly why He’s letting me go through this, because I’m seeking him. If I was content to remain a spiritual infant, and assuming God didn’t mind me staying that way, He might wipe His hands and let me sit in spiritual atrophy. Of course, He loves me too much to let me dwindle into spiritual torpor, like any parent who takes away a security blanket so their child learns to do without it. They may scream and bawl for a while, but eventually they’ll learn to make do, and find they didn’t really need that security blanket to begin with.

And don’t misunderstand me; I’m not saying I’m totally cured of greed and can now become a billionaire without any problems. Au contraire, mon fraire! Like any vice and virtue in this earthly journey, I’ll never fully arrive at perfection until God strips off the last vestiges of the flesh and I am given a new body. However, I have a new appreciation for money and for my own ability to generate it. All money comes at the pleasure of God; that job you have that you think is due to your modest talents and skills, you could lose tomorrow. That fat bank account you rely on for retirement or a nice vacation this summer could be wiped out in a second. Or in a year, like mine, not through reckless spending but simply because you’re paying bills and not making money. Which leads us to jobs and the like, which is again out of your control. What is in your control, the only thing in your control, is your relationship with the Lord. God’s attitude toward you (and by “attitude” I mean stance; think of how a golfer addresses the ball) is unchanging. What changes is our attitude toward Him; and by attitude I mean stance, but our stance can be affected by our circumstances, which affect our feelings or “attitude” in the more traditional sense of the word. And this is the fundamental, the Grip. Because once we get into the proper attitude towards God and regarding ourselves, everything else follows from it. Like the Grip in golf, a proper starting point will allow us to build upon the foundation, will enable us to create new opportunities and ways of interacting with the Lord and with others. And this will actually lead to better results in us, in our relationships with others, and in our walk with God. (Not incidentally, improved relationships with others can lead to improvements in feelings, finances…you know, all those things we think of as being the “fundamentals” of life.) Like the Grip fixing that tendency to slice our tee shots without directly addressing it, the right relationship with God can fix our marriages, create opportunities to witness to unbelievers, enhance our professional status, and increase our overall enjoyment of life. But getting the Grip right comes first.

In the quote Hogan claims that the golfer will “rediscover golf—in fact, discover golf for the first time.” This means that what the person has been doing, that is supposedly Golf in their mind, has in fact been something not quite Golf. Just like you can be singing a song that you think you know, but if you don’t know the right words, you’re not really singing that particular song. There is an objective reality to things even if we don’t know what it is, or even can’t know it for whatever reason. But the point here is that Golf as it is and not as you think it is will follow from a proper grasp of the fundamentals. And this means that you’re not playing Golf until you do. In the same way, Life, the Christian life, is an objective reality. And I (for I shall use myself as the example; feel free to draw analogies to your own lot as you see fit) have not been living Life with God. Oh, I’ve been a Christian for quite some time now, just as I have been playing “golf” since the age of 20. But like the erroneous perception of the Grip, I haven’t really been living the Christian life, as God defines it. This is evidenced in the simple fact that I still fail, and that I’m undergoing a process of refining, of purification, breaking down the tough lump of clay to the point where it can be shaped into the Master’s vision. A proper clay jar doesn’t need to be broken into pieces to be made into a proper clay jar; it’s already a clay jar! This may seem like an foolish tautology, but I’m sure it’s sound. A properly working machine doesn’t need to be taken apart to be fixed because it’s working properly. It may seem too simple. But the machine that is Me, my spiritual life, is not fixed. It’s sputtering along, wheezing and meandering all over the place. The Lord has to pull me over to the side of the road and start taking out parts, replacing the incorrect or broken ones, and cleaning the clogged hoses. This means some deconstruction, some major overhauls, and that takes time and inconvenience. But the result is that the machine of my spiritual life will eventually run like a top. Or so I assume.

Hogan mentions earlier in the chapter that a grip too tight will cause all sorts of problems, and is as detrimental to a grip too loose. If you strangle the club, it will strangle your game. If you keep a firm yet easy grasp, your game improves. As with life. If I try too hard to obey God, to take the initiative, I can foil His attempts to teach me things. I’m certainly not walking in dependence upon Him, which is the essence of the Christian walk Jesus modeled on earth. Conversely, a too laissez-faire approach to life, to let God do all the work, is no more effective and fulfilling than a stranglehold. Different problems arise, but they well equally foil your communion with the Lord. That balance one must strike is key, and devilishly difficult to find, even harder to maintain. But the more you seek it, the oftener you find it, and the easier it is to regain and retain that balance. Likewise, as your familiarity with the proper grip increases, you can quickly, effortlessly, and instinctually duplicate it for every shot.

“He will make errors, of course, because he is human, but he will be a golfer and the game will be a source of ever-increasing pleasure for him.” Like all initiates, the fresh-faced greenhorn quickly learns what he doesn’t know, how he doesn’t meet the bill, where he doesn’t make the grade. Nowhere is this more readily apparent than in Christian life. For nowhere are the stakes higher and the transformation more radical. A golfer may have the most horrendous grip imaginable, one that makes an instructor pale in horror at the sheer ignorance and fallibility of such a grip. “You swing that club like a baseball bat,” he may wail, “and you hold it like a rake!” But no matter how erroneous a grip the beginner has on the club, it is still not more than a nanometer away from the correct grip compared to the light years separating an earthly walk from a truly Christ-like one. Easier to teach a fish to climb trees than to teach a dead man how to be alive. So we start at a disadvantage, though the word isn’t even a beginning on explaining the true state of affairs. Yet, the novice golfer will begin to make strides; as he plays more and more, reads literature about proper stance and grip, takes lessons from pros and partners and the guy they paired him with, as experience teaches him how to play bunker shots and knock-downs, he begins to resemble that which he is, a golfer. Even great players like Hogan or Nicklaus or Tiger Woods didn’t swing a perfect stroke the first time they gripped a club, and they all practiced like fiends to hone their craft, to add more shots and more confidence in their game, to gain another five yards of distance or another five percent backspin, knowing that the difference between victory and defeat may be their ability to put a drive twenty feet beyond their competitor and spin their ball four inches closer to the hole. But they are golfers whether they win or lose, shoot a 62 or an 84, play for a green jacket or a cool one at the clubhouse. They are golfers because of who they are and what they do, not because of how well they play. I am a golfer because I love to play and I play whenever I can.

Likewise, I am not a Christian because I walk a perfect line with Christ, utterly dependent on the Holy Spirit, completely unified with the Father, never lusting, envying, fearing, doubting, snarling, gossiping, failing. I may never conquer all my sins in this life, in fact, that’s a safe bet. But I am a Christian because of who I am, because of what I choose to be, how I choose to live and move and have my being, and what therefore the Lord has done to me, through me, and for me. “Christian” doesn’t mean “perfect”; it means “desiring to walk with God, relying on Jesus to save me from the brink, trusting in the Holy Spirit to remake me despite myself.”
And as I grow in my knowledge and understanding of golf, of how to hit shots, what irons do what, how to chip and putt, my love and respect for the game grows and feeds my desire to return to it again, to discover new challenges and experience new joys. And as I progress in surrendering to Christ, in yielding to the refining process of the Father, to the metamorphosis of the Spirit, and as that translates into actions and behavior and emotion in my life, my understanding of who God is ever deepens and draws me back to Him more and more. The addiction spirals down the more you feed it, but not all addictions are bad. (And no, I’m not saying my addiction to golf is good.) So how addicted to Jesus are you?