Games People Play

Honestly, My Beloved Sinners, is there any other event in Biblical Christianity’s calendar as inspiring as the Olympic Games? The nationalism, the steroid stimulated loins clad in lycra, and more corrupt old men flying first class than a conference of Conservative Bishops – the Olympics truly are a foretaste of what the world will be like when Jesus finally gets around to coming back and tossing (lovingly, of course) everyone who doesn’t agree with my theology into the Lake of Fire.

Mind you, as an Olympic Gold Medallist myself (Live Pigeon Shooting – Paris 1900) I quite naturally have a special interest in The Olympic Movement, and the following picture of me raising my right in celebration of fascism’s only military victory with the definitive Olympic junketer, His Excellency Juan Antonio Samaranch, will always occupy a place of pride on the St. Onuphrius’ sanctuary wall. (I’m obviously the extraordinarily handsome clergyman in dark glasses on the far right – as a symbolic testimony to the purity of both my own and Olympic ideals I’m wearing a white clerical shirt instead of my more customary shade of practical duck-egg blue.)

Sadly, however, fewer and fewer of today’s athletes share my unequalled respect for Sacred Olympic values. Not only do the modern games permit women competitors, but in a sharp and tragic contrast to the Bible-believing days of Ancient Greece, contestants no longer participate nude. And I have it on good authority that being of a homosexualist persuasion – something unheard of in ancient Athens - is these days no bar to entry.

Nor should anyone get me started on the scourge of drugs. I attribute the demise of my own sport to this menace: blasting a pigeon into the hereafter is hardly a challenge when the little beasts are too stoned to fly – even if the resultant mess is nonetheless quite satisfying for someone who takes the Old Testament as literally as I do. That’s why I was so glad to see the opening ceremony’s musical directors were those two young men from Underworld, whose extensive involvement with the famously anti-drug dance/rave culture sends exactly the right message vis-à-vis substance abuse in sport.

Indeed: I’d be in London enjoying the Olympic Spirit myself were it not for the fact that I’m currently right in the middle of fighting to terminate a liberal subterfuge which has the potential to utterly destroy Conservative Christianity. Codenamed “Project Stop-Whining”, I’m not prepared to divulge many of the details here given that I have good reason to believe my homilies are frequently read aloud to not just those who are the product of Evangelical home-schooling, but also to women, so for now let me just say that it involves working in one’s parish with the same dedication and diligence as is expected of anyone in secular employment – a hideously radical notion which could not only render the Anglican Communion Institute completely irrelevant (presuming it isn’t already so), but could even lead to a world in which religious experts like David Ould were obliged to do something morre with their time than obsessively seeking to track down those who dare to laugh at them for being nasty dishonest pharisees.

Nevertheless, I’m proud to say St. Onuphrius’ has not been without representation at this Sacred Biblical Convocation. This past month our own Bishop Quinine has been personally assisting the Chinese team. While he’s had to be a bit secretive about the precise nature of his involvement (Olympic Protocol and all that), I do know he’s been working particularly closely with their swimmers, weight-lifters, and female shot putters (is there any sport as glamorous as shot putting?), and I’m absolutely certain he’s been providing them with the sort of spiritual inspiration that only a faux-bishop can deliver when appropriately remunerated. Nor has he been confining his Ministry to the Chinese: with the Jensenists too broke to provide pastoral care for any fellow Australians not a member of their immediate family Bishop Quinine has been called upon to also provide them with pastoral support – as anyone who read this news report will have immediately recognized.

Which is in itself just one small example of the much broader blessing of Peace and Global Understanding that the Sacred Olympic Movement has brought our depraved and sinful world. Looking through history one simply can’t deny the facts: just look at how an understanding of Olympic Ideals brought peace to Afghanistan, how encountering Olympic tolerance taught China the importance of Tibetan independence, and how that poster of Mark Spitz cured a generation of young men of homosexualist yearnings.

I’m Father Christian and I teach the Bible.