At around 11:30 today, I was having lunch at Amigo, and on the restaurant's TV, a Super Bowl pregame show was on. Now, I haven't followed this event much in the last few years. I can't remember the last game I actually sat and watched. But I figured that the game must be coming on around 2:00 or so. Imagine my surprise to find out that the game isn't until 6:25! How many hours of pregame stuff is that? Seven, at least!

From the days of Bob Hayes, I've always been a fan of the Dallas Cowboys. My favorite teams were always chosen on the basis of a single player that I loved to watch: the Cowboys via Hayes, the Lakers via Elgin Baylor, the Cubs via Ernie Banks and the Giants via Willie Mays. All of them African-American men, which is interesting.

Anyway, although I didn't know what time today's Super Bowl game is to take place, I did know that it was between the Bears and the Colts. Neither team really moves me, but I'm going to pull for the Colts in memory of my father (1931-1996), who was a Baltimore Colts fan back in the days of Johnny Unitas.

Here's the question that's been somewhere in my mind--the back or the front--for some time now:

"The problem of the nature of faith plagues us all our lives. Is openness to other ideas infidelity or is it the beginning of spiritual maturity?" It's from the writing of Sister Joan Chittister and quoted on a Speaking of Faith installment called "Obedience and Action." Here's how Sister Chittister, in her interview, responds:

Well, you see, the old institutional answer was that it's infidelity. But if you move as a person of faith, immersed in your own — the best of your own spiritual tradition, then you can only come to the other end of that sentence, "It is openness to the best and to the wholeness." We don't have gods, we have God. We are all moving toward that God within the limitations and with all of the gifts that each of these great, seeking traditions gives us in our culture. Now, where all of that is going to come out, it doesn't even bother me. I just know that the Jesus story is my story, that I walk with Jesus, that I feel that presence, that I know that path, and that that path, the path I walk, to me seems very much like the path from Galilee to Jerusalem that Jesus walked, raising women from the dead and curing lepers. I am convinced that where I am going is on just the end of the path that I started years ago.