The Hockey Sweater

The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places – the school, the church and the skating-rink – but our real life was on the skating-rink....

I attended a church planting conference last week in Calgary. Its focus was on many of the new things happening in church work, and particularly some of the new ways church is engaging the “post modern” world. It was great.

At one point the emcee, Cam Roxburgh, shared the above quotation. It’s from The Hockey Sweater, by Roch Carrier and is printed on the five dollar bill. – I was convinced he was pretending to read it, but when I got home I discovered that my wife actually can read it, but only with her glasses off. Go figure. – If you have not read The Hockey Sweater you owe it to yourself to do so. By clicking on the title you can watch a neat little National Film Board short in which a slightly edited version is read by the author. It’s a Canadian classic.

At any rate, the statement by Carrier is profound, and something all teachers and pastors should understand. School and church are places of retreat from “real” life. They are extremely important, to be sure, but places apart nonetheless. If school doesn’t introduce us to the market place and church doesn’t lead us to the street, what good are they?

When Jesus came, as he said, “that we might have life”, he came to a stable, not to a church, and taught in the market place, not in a school. And so it is with us. When we come to life, we come to the world, that great skating rink. For, as Roch Carrier continues:

...Real battles were won on the skating-rink. Real strength appeared on the skating-rink. The real leaders showed themselves on the skating-rink. School was a sort of punishment. Parents always want to punish children and school is their most natural way of punishing us. However, school was also a quiet place where we could prepare for the next hockey game, lay out our strategies. As for church, we found there the tranquillity of God: there we forgot school and dreamed about the next hockey game. Through our daydreams it might happen that we would recite a prayer: we would ask God to help us play as well as Maurice Richard.