On Super Bowl Sunday, Mind Your Soup

On Super Bowl Sunday, or on any other day for that matter, do you prefer to keep politics, religion and sports separate — like food items not touching on a plate—or do you like the mélange of tastes that comes when they’re all swirling around together?

Seems to me that there are really good kinds of soups, the broth-based ones with wholesome ingredients that bring comfort on cold days; and then the other kind that could, with the right ingredients mixed wisely, be mentally stimulating, but too often are instead the unappetizing and sometimes downright damaging products of sloppy thinking.

At this time of year, I always remember a restaurant in downtown Amherst called “Souperbowl.” It’s closed now, apparently, and was in truth always a little odd. Before its demise it tried to be more than just a cozy place offering just a few kinds of delicious soup each day. For some reason they took over a cavernous new space, installed a long bar with a huge mirror over it — a site that must have been prepared to serve all kinds of exotic drinks. But it was always empty.

They must have miscalculated, because over time, the regular patrons who were devotees of what was ladled out of those huge pots surely would have spread the word through the Pioneer Valley and they could have kept their original character, growing only slightly. Such, at least, is my high estimation of what truly excellent soup—and soup alone– could achieve in a college town.

Of course it’s always better to make our own soup when we can, and I plan to do just that today before the Big Game with a similar name gets underway.

On my hour-long commute in the morning, I often land upon Boston sports talk radio, especially when the BBC News gets a tad dry. Over the past week of course, it’s been all Pats, all the time. The fascination with the team, and especially Brady, is endless. How can he be this amazingly good at age 39? How will he handle meeting Roger Goodell on the podium? Will the questions on Deflategate ever be laid to rest? What’s going on in his family? In his mind? And—this one is tough: Does it matter that apparently he considers Trump a friend? Can we, should we, try to keep our football (well, OK, I know we don’t all claim it) free from politics?

That depends, I think, on whether there’s any possibility of gaining yardage from mixing the two. Flag on the play! Ruling is—NO! Keep the President off the field. Let Brady and everyone else out there just be football players.

Meanwhile, the President himself is getting into some hot water with more inappropriate mingling. Last week at the National Prayer Breakfast, he said he plans to “totally destroy” the Johnson Amendment which has, since 1954, discouraged clergy from fully endorsing political candidates because their tax-exempt status would be at stake. You can read an article (2/2/2017) on this in The New York Times here. The way he wants it, pulpits would soon ring out with unbridled political stances, and evidently he’s counting on the voices on the right to be the strongest.

What would ensue would be a dangerous diminishment of the generally well-respected separation between church and state. Do we really want religious services, seeking to provide some oasis of peace to congregants, to bring political divisions much more out in the open?

While it’s true that all of us would do well to seek out people with views different from our own, to have honest and rich conversations about what we believe our American way of life should be and why, church hardly seems like the best setting for glares or even all-out fights over matters of national policy. Religious services need to rise above this kind of thing, and that’ s not the same as saying they should skirt the important moral issues of our time. It’s a fine line, perhaps, but there’s still a line.

The article I provided the link for presents a number of Trump’s actual statements from the Prayer Breakfast. This one, to me, is the most disturbing.

“America is a nation of believers,” he said. “The quality of our lives is not defined by our material success, but by our spiritual success.”

Believers in what, exactly? He’s trying to depart from his usual identity as zillionaire here, but those of us who have been in the trenches with our own souls know there is really no such a thing as “spiritual success.” No moment of full attainment, just constant tending and maybe greater understanding of what keeps us whole. In fact, the phrase sounds almost like an oxymoron, as if internal serenity can be achieved with the clang of a gong.

If I had the chance to go back to the Souper Bowl on North Pleasant Street once again, I’d be glad for them to weigh my container of Vegetable Barley and charge me accordingly. But when it comes to how my spirituality is faring, I’m on my own. It may get a tad better, though, when I go down to the local pond and skate with some of my neighbors I haven’t yet met. Maybe we’ll talk Pats together, and that will be a good start.