I saw a book on the New Releases stand recently and it took me a moment to figure out the title, Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success It is ostensibly written by Phil Jackson (aren't there always ghost writers with sports memoirs?) the former NBA coach with both the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers. He won a total of eleven titles with those two teams and while it helped to have Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippen with the Bulls, and Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal with the Lakers, how do you argue with that kind of success? You might notice that there are a lucky thirteen rings in the photo because Jackson also won a couple as a journeyman player with the New York Knicks. Remarkable.
I didn't give much thought to the book which has become an immediate bestseller, other than that the title and cover seemed a bit "over the top": why didn't he just call it Lotsa Bling: The Soul of Excess? But I do realize that it contains Jackson's musings about the spiritual elements of his coaching style.
Jackson grew up in a Pentecostal Christian household where his father was a pastor and his mother asked Phil's college friends if they were "right with the Lord." I saw Jackson interviewed on PBS by Tavis Smiley and they shared thoughts about their strict and dogmatic Pentecostal upbringings. I must admit that it was quite engaging. Somehow Jackson gravitated toward Buddhism through the years and it was his unorthodox, "Zen" approach to coaching which got him a lot of attention. It sounds as though he has moved toward Philism, his own hybrid form of spirituality. In some ways this is the spirit of our time, and the blingy cover of his book says "look what my brand of spirituality produced.
Any thoughts about this approach to spirituality and its application? Do we live in an " a la carte" era where we choose what we want for the goals we want to achieve? What about Jackson himself? Would you read his book?
The Scotty Bowman of basketball, eh? You know you're doing well if you have more championship rings than you have fingers.
ReplyDeleteDidn't realize his spirituality, but then again the media doesn't tend to cover those kinds of things during the regular season (or ever!)
I have never heard of "philism".... what is it?
ReplyDeleteIt's my play on Phil Jackson's first name. It's his own brand of religion.
ReplyDeleteSeems to be the trend for sure.....creating something that works for us rather than looking and working at things we might change about ourselves so we might find membership in the fabric of existing faiths. Some of them like the Phil-ism, and maybe the Gospel According to Oprah from a distance seem to almost create a "greater power" in the designer-messenger.
ReplyDeleteAt UC Bay Of Quinte Conference AGM one of the speakers asked the question as we pondered financial challenges whether we even needed the national church, or could we be just small,neighborhood congregations, not connected by a greater network. I don't know exactly how they thought that might look, but the thought scared me. We have read of a UC that doesn't read scripture anymore....what else would evolve if we were all left to create our own comfortable spirituality.
Often I feel faith is formed most deeply in the struggles to understand our call as a church in current times....and often it is uncomfortable ....