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We British are an emotional lot; yet pretend all the time that we aren't. If you're listening to this sipping tea from a mug inscribed, 'Keep calm and carry on', you either have a well developed sense of irony or you're in serious denial.
The nation's emotional life was on display yesterday afternoon for the mens' tennis final at Wimbledon. Points scored, points lost, displays of sheer brilliance or heroic failure – all produced their moments of collective emotional catharsis. And afterwards, when Andy Murray's heart-stopping victory finally came, we fell back emotionally spent. If you're also a Lions Rugby fan, I don't know how you survived the weekend.
Yet what is for us, in the end, only a game, is hardly so for those who compete. What once originated as recreation and innocent pleasure, is today a career and an industry. Except for those of us who only watch, the innocence went out of professional sport a long time ago.
St Paul once famously compared the spiritual life to that of the sportsman, the athlete. It's an analogy that fills me with some dread. Does the spiritual life really require that degree of intensity, that degree of dedication and sacrifice? Paul even speaks about pummeling his body in order to subdue it and bring it under control. Well, it is only one description, one analogy. Perhaps what he was getting at was what Sophocles meant when he said that the unexamined or unreflective life was hardly worth living.