I'm Talking About Practice

I don't like Pete Carroll, or at least I didn't use to. Maybe it was that his teams dominated like few college teams have over a three year period. Maybe it was ESPN's hype machine talking too much about USC or maybe it was all those Heisman Trophies the Trojans won. Maybe it was the way Carroll struts and stomps on the sidelines during games, or maybe it was jealousy at the way they owned college football supremacy, snatching it away from programs in my beloved Southeast Conference. For whatever reason, something about the guy just rubbed me the wrong way.

But as I was making my way through the Internet this morning before church, I stumbled across a wonderful profile of USC's coach in the L.A. Times. The opening story of Carroll visiting men and women in some of the roughest neighborhoods and listening grabs your attention, but there was another piece of the story that stuck with me this morning in church.

Carroll has to pass through the USC music building on his way from his office to the practice field, and the sound of wannabe musicians pounding out notes day after day serves as an echo of one of Carroll's central themes.

“One thing I’ve learned, which I was taught a long time ago but didn’t grasp at the time, is the power of practice,” Carroll says. “The discipline that comes from practice, that allows you to transcend the early stages of learning and take you to a point where you’re free floating and totally improvising. Through the discipline, the repetition, you become free.”

I spent four years as a sports reporter, so the idea of a football coach stressing the importance of practice doesn't register as breaking news. However, reading Carroll talk about the routine of practice and the way that discipline can free us piqued my interest.

One of the hardest parts of my time in seminary has been finding ways to practice my faith in the midst of studying. I know practices are all the rage in theological education (thank you Diana Bass and Craig Dykstra), but Carroll's point led me to think about the ideas in a slightly different way.

I attend a school of theology that views itself as progressive, constantly defining itself against conservative or evangelical ways of doing things. Professors have talked about defining spirituality and faith as not as structured or defined as their more conservative brethren often do. For example, prayer is not sitting down and reading the Bible and then talking and listening to God, but prayer can be many different things. Life is prayer.

All this is well and good, but I wonder if we have to get to a certain point for this to take root. Maybe we need a discipline, a practice, that can then free us as we progress in our faith. I have found that as legalistic as it might sound, spending time reading and praying, a "devotional time", is important and can help me nourish the spiritual life that others might find in more broader terms. The discipline, the process of going over something, of doing it again and again, is worthwhile. As Carroll claims, we can only be free, maybe we can only go deeper as we cultivate the routine.

I can't remember the sheer number of times that I have heard coaches proclaim, "you play how you practice." Allen Iverson's protests to the contrary, practice matters. If we practice, if we spend our time cultivating a way of doing something, then we can improvise and maybe move beyond that to something deeper or " better".

I'm hoping to practice. I'm hoping to find a way to practice what I believe, to be trained and formed into patterns that will help me become the person that God has called me to be. Sounds like a good New Year's resolution to me.