One Body, One Swing

          The 2014 bestseller Boys in the Boat narrates the odds-bending story of a 1936 US crew team from the University of Washington, a west coast school scorned as athletically and socially inferior by the rowing elite of the east. Manned by boys mostly from poor and unconnected backgrounds, the UW crew won the Olympic Gold Medal in front of Adolf Hitler. In the Prologue the author Daniel James Brown visits the death bed of the number three seat, a powerhouse of a young man from the “engine room” of the boat. Much of the book documents the life of this man named Joe Rantz, who barely survived the abject poverty of the Depression and his abandonment at ten years old by his family.
          A few days before Joe died, Brown visited him to explain he was going to write about the legendary victory in the midst of the Nazi elite intent on promoting the Aryan race. In preparing to present Germany to the world in a grand light, Joseph Goebbels built the greatest sports complex in the world at the time, the very same stadium that nine war-ravaged years later, German boys even younger than these rowers, taken from their mothers in the Nazi’s last attempt to survive, climbed the ruins of this stadium to fire at the oncoming Russian boys overrunning Berlin. When the German boys said they were too scared or they didn’t want to kill another person, their own officers lined them up against the stadium wall and shot them.

          I will return to this horrific irony later in this homily.

          But back to Joe Rantz, who on his death bed asked Brown, “Will you speak of the boat?”

          For days the author pondered what that meant. What did he mean by “speak of the boat”? Did he mean the “boys in the boat”? Did Joe want him to narrate the lives of each boy and their bond as a group? Or did he mean the boat itself, the astonishing craftsmanship of the carving of the shells from ash trees and the great red cedars of the west, slicked down by whale oil?

          Please hold that question in your mind. What does “the boat” mean?

          Now let’s turn to a month ago, in the January 26^th edition of The New York Times. Reporter David Shimer tells the story of one course at one university that’s trending across the country. “Psychology and the Good Life” is a course not about goodness, as the title implies, but about happiness. This “happiness course” has more sign ups than any other course in this university’s history. Any. The students give themselves a grade according to how their lives change as they take the course. The professor says, “we’re facing a mental health crisis” in the young. Students have to deprioritize their happiness in order to get into college. [Now] [t]hey need to have more gratitude, procrastinate less, and increase social connections. We’re actually seeding change in the school’s culture.”

          I read this, Gentlemen, and I despair.

          What, Mr. Wilson, you don’t want us to be happy?

          I read this, Gentlemen, and I despair.

          Mental health is crucial to life—my daughter does God’s work. She is a school counselor, the equivalent of Dr. Friend at a public school in Boston. Few people know as well as I do how stressful getting into college is, nor how important gratitude, a work ethic, and social connections are. But in order to find them, fashioning your life around the primary goal to be happy is a profound and, I believe, even a life-threatening mistake. This kind of thinking reminds me of the atheist bus campaign in London started in 2008 by Richard Dawkins. The atheist signs on the classic two decker red busses read, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Pause, if you will. I ask you. That’s the only reason we’re here—to enjoy our lives?

Not to suffer, not to work, not to be sad, not to cry, not to despair, not to discover joy, which isn’t, I remind you, happiness?

          Let us return to 1934 when the three crew coaches at the University of Washington began critiquing the boys who tried out for crew. Over the course of the next two years the workouts in every condition of Washington weather were brutal—freeze on the lake, row to your hands were raw, your back a constant ache, your lungs bursting, literally. Young man after young man quit.

This is an unfair rhetorical trick, but indulge me. Imagine the 2018 professor on the shore cupping hands and yelling out to those young men on the river. “Yes, you, and you, and you, quit that insanity. What are you doing? You should enjoy life. Out there on the river there is no gratitude. Out there on the river there are no fun social connections!”

Joe Rantz as a rower was not an immediate success. He was brutally strong but couldn’t make the first boat. Then the man who carved the boats took him aside and said, “Joe, when you really start trusting those other boys [and not trying to do it all by yourself], you will feel a power at work within you that is far beyond anything you’ve ever imagined. Sometimes, you will feel as if you rowed right off the planet and are rowing among the stars.” Later on, the boat-maker calls this common feeling “the swing,” the fourth dimension of rowing, when the run is uncanny and the work of propelling the shell a delight.”

The swing. I like that. The word makes me happy.

          I simplify the philosophical inquiry I hope you do for the rest of your lives. Since ancient times many have decided that the purpose of life is to enjoy it, to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Daniel James Brown never forgot Joe Rantz’s death bed insistence that he write about “the boat.” A humble man, Joe was more interested in talking about the other boys on the boat than himself, and the most interested in talking about “the boat” itself. In researching the book, the author figured out, of course, that Joe was talking about the experience, the common uncanny effort with others to create the unearthly, uncommon feeling of a “swing.”

          Our straw man college professor said you need more gratitude. Was anyone more full of gratitude than Joe Rantz? Our college professor said you need less procrastination. I imagine there were a lot of days when Joe could imagine not going out on the river for another workout, but I suspect once he was in the boat there was never a moment when he didn’t know what he was supposed to do and, in fact, what he wanted to do, what he was called to do. That college professor says you need more social connections. I answer, quite simply, the boys in the boat.

          It would be rhetorically neat to end this homily now with that last line, “the boys in the boat.” But I must be honest and explain why I mentioned the German boys at the end of the war, the teenagers their own officers killed? “The swing” must be morally good. In World War II millions of German men your age and older got swept up in the most efficient killing machine human kind had known. That’s when you get out of the boat. Our scripture today talks of us as one body with many parts, but the key phrase is one body “in Christ.”

          In this homily I have also elevated sports. There is plenty about the business of sports that isn’t Christ-like, we know that, but I love sports for you and deeply believe in its value. As I do putting on a musical together this weekend. But just like week I was reminded of the point I want to make again about the good of sports. On a brutally cold day each successive winner of the men’s cross-country skiing in the Olympics waited to hug the next finisher of the race, one after one after another. If you watched, you know that each man when he finished had nothing left, absolutely nothing, which is all a coach can ask. But then, spontaneously, all the finishers hoisted the last man in the race onto their shoulders to celebrate. They had competed against each other, but together they had created a perfect race, each to his max, a swing never to be forgotten.

          And, oh yea, I bet they were happy.

          Now go in peace to love and serve the Lord.