Article

Character

Creed

Sport

6 August 2024

6 min read

Letter to the Olympians

A veteran sports chaplain writes a letter to Christian Olympians, on how they can find joy amid the 'funerals and weddings' of the games.

Ashley Null

Ashley Null serves as a chaplain to elite athletes and coaches. He is also a priest and an academic.

A swimmer at the end of a race, looks to the result screen.

Adam Peaty after an Olympic race.

BBC.

Dear Friend,

Congratulations on being selected to compete in the Olympics - the greatest games in the world! I’m sure you can’t wait to get out there and show the world what you’ve got - your amazing talent and skill and all the hard work and dedication that has gone into becoming an Olympian.

Now, it has been said that being at the Olympics is like experiencing 10 funerals for every 1 wedding. You know this if you’re in elite sport - every one person’s victory is at the expense of many others’ agony of defeat.

These next few weeks will be full of the strongest emotions and potential challenges to how you think about your faith. What does it look like to integrate your faith and your sport in the midst of such pressure?

First, God has called you to the Olympics to experience true joy.

The first reason God gave the good gift of sport is for it to bring joy.

“In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course,” writes the Psalmist.

God compares our sport to a honeymoon - both physically and emotionally satisfying - what high praise for the joy of sport!

Every race, every match, every competition, is an opportunity to experience this God-given joy.

This joy will help you in the ups and especially in the downs over the next few weeks. The Bible makes this clear again and again, that it is joy that helps us endure the difficulties in life.

These next few weeks, make a conscious effort to count every blessing, thanking God for the joy of sport and the amazing experience he has given you.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport... By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

Second, but Elite Competition isn’t only about joy. It includes uncertainty, fear, and even loss. God can use all aspects of sport, both the highs and the lows, to draw you closer to Himself.

The second reason God give gifts to his people is to use them as a school of discipleship.

St Paul writing to Christians in Ephesus said: “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ."

God has given you this vocation as a ‘school of discipleship’ to learn what it looks like to love God and love others.

As you compete and lean on the promises of God, you have endless opportunities to grow in living out your faith.

To remember your identity is based on the cross and not your success and failures
To remember the power you have to compete does not come from your own strength but from Christ who is at work in you
To remember your standing before God does not change because of God’s grace, whether you win or lose, fail or succeed
To remember that if you do lose, God will be there with you and use your pain, but that the pain will not have the last word in your life - God will work all things for good

Third, you can serve others as you compete.

As you compete you can witness to many the wonderful joy of sport:

By competing drug-free and within the rules you can show an alternative to the winner-takes-all attitude so prevalent in all sport.
By not treating your opponent as the enemy but valuing them as a ‘co-worker’ you can push each other on to excellence.
By showing humility and thankfulness in victory, recognising that other Christian athletes have worked just as hard and prayed just as much, but that God has set aside gifts other than Olympic success for them.
By not torturing yourself in defeat with self-loathing and shame, instead rejoicing with those who win and weeping with those who don’t.

In all this you can show the wonderful, transforming news of the gospel at work in your life as you experience joy in the midst of the funerals and weddings seen at the Olympic Games.

But what if things don’t work out as you hoped? God will be there for you and with you in the midst of the pain. As you grieve, look for Jesus.

He will give you the comfort you long for.

He will remind you that his love for you is stronger and will last much longer than your present pain.
He will assure you that he still has good things for you.

Ask his help to hold on to this truth. Because when you are hurting, it is so easy to listen to lies. You see, it’s a real danger to view God as your ultimate coach.

The lie says that if you make good spiritual choices then you will be on God’s winning team and blessed with success. But when success doesn’t happen, the lie says it’s because you have made bad choices and don’t deserve to be on the team, at least not until you can prove yourself spiritually good enough again.

In all of your sporting career you’ve probably been taught to only feel good about yourself when you’re winning, that if you lose, you’re nothing. Your coaches may have told you to use the shame of losing to motivate you to success.

Friend, you need to separate your sense of worth, your identity, from your performance. Equating significance and achievement will always leave your self-esteem at the mercy of the natural ups and downs of being a top-level sportsperson. But only love has the power to make humans feel significant, performance never will.

The good news of the gospel is that in God, you have unconditional love, not based on any of your performance. You are valued and loved not because of the talents you have or the way you compete. Your worth and value is seen in the love God proved he had for you when he died for you on the cross.

St Paul tells us:

“God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

Now, as people reconciled to God there is no condemnation, nothing can separate us from God’s love and we are adopted as God’s children - this is who you are. This is where you identity alone can be found. This is where you can find peace, even in the midst of a major loss.

Friends, enjoy these next few weeks and the amazing opportunity it is. If you feel the pain of loss, know that with Jesus pain never has the last word. His love always does. If you win, know that it is a wonderful gift of God to be thankful for, and he will make good use of it, long after you have retired, giving you decades of joy.

Solo Deo Gloria!

Adapted by Jonny Reid, for Christians in Sport, from Pastoral Care in the Olympic Village by Ashley Null in Sports Chaplaincy: Trends, Issues and Debates.

Explainer

Creed

Death & life

Monsters

Paganism

24 October 2025

5 min read

Will the owner of ‘Halloween’ please come and collect it?

A mutant festival of saints, spirits, and supermarket costumes resists belonging to anyone

Jack Chisnall

Jack Chisnall is a former gag teller and Oxford Theology graduate, combining the two at Holy Fooling.

A witch, a priest and a druid stand in a store and look quizzically towards a halloween pumpkin

Nick Jones, Midjourney.ai

The trouble with modern Halloween is that it’s hard to say who it really belongs to. Our contemporary public holiday – 31 October, when people dress up as skeletons, light jack-o-lanterns, and go ‘trick-or-treating’ – has a few prospective owners.

Perhaps Christians could claim it. The term “Halloween” is a shortening of ‘All Hallow’s Eve’, which is the day before All Saint’s Day (1 November) in the Church calendar.

But this doesn’t fit with a few things. Don’t Christians dislike all that dressing up as evil spirits, and summoning up misrule and revelry? Instead, the case is made for a pagan ownership of Halloween: it was all due to a Celtic festival called Samhain (pronounced ‘sow-in’). This was a day for appeasing evil spirits, contacting the dead, and acts of mischief – all better fits for modern Halloween, surely?

Sadly, we just don’t know enough about Samhain to say. We only have evidence about it from centuries after the Christian era, and in limited scraps like: “Samhain, when the summer goes to its rest”. It is unlikely the Christians invented this, to be sure – but none of the data tells us how it was celebrated.

In fact, there is no evidence at all that All Saints Day was a churchy attempt to ‘take over’ a pre-existing pagan festival. From the get-go, Christians commemorated their dead on the basis that they were still alive in heaven, and able to bring prayers to God. A quick peek at the Book of Revelation (the final book of the Bible) gives a behind-the-curtain look: “and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel”.

Over time, it became more official which ‘holy ones’, or saints, should be honoured at which times. This was not about making dead Christians into gods, though. A famous theologian called St Augustine explains the proper view of the early Christians as they kept hold of bones and clothing from their dead: “We do not build temples, and ordain priests, rites, and sacrifices for these same martyrs; for they are not our gods, but their God is our God”.

Gradually, a date was set to celebrate all those great men and women in heaven – from this came All Saints, or All Hallows Day. A tradition in northern Europe set this on the 1 November: “As a jewel worn on the brow sparkles time and again, so November at its beginning is resplendent with the praise given to all the saints” reports an English calendar from around 800AD.

It is all well and good celebrating those who have made it to heaven. But what about the majority of Christians? Those who had died unrepentant and lukewarm – what on earth could be done for them? Here came another separate development: offering prayers and worship on behalf of those who had died as forgiven sinners, but who were still, if you like, serving their time for their bad choices.

It gradually became the norm to tack that practice onto the pre-existing All Saints Day, so that the souls of regular Joes could have powerful heavenly intercessors close by. And so, All Souls Day became an established part of the Church’s year too, falling on 2 November.

But here’s the twist. This season of ‘Hallowtide’ (All Saints and All Souls together) carried on for centuries, until England suddenly and violently abandoned it all in the sixteenth century. Seemingly overnight, the Reformations of the Tudor monarchs ended All Souls Day by scrapping all mention of a purgatory for the dead, and attempts to pray for them there. All Saints Day limped on in the new Established Religion as a remembrance of Christian exemplars – but they were not to be thought of as in radio contact from heaven anymore.

Some people tried to carry on as usual, in illicit gatherings on hilltops, where they would burn straw, and gather to ask for help from great saints and pray for loved ones. But the majority followed the new religious settlement and tried to forge new communal rituals as best they could. The night still had a ‘supernatural’ afterglow thanks to centuries of the now-absent All Saints and All Souls.

Then, in the nineteenth century, there was a comeback. Irish immigration to the USA and Great Britain plonked a fully formed Hallowtide into English-speaking culture again. It took like a duck to water. Perhaps this was to be expected. Here was a civilisation which had been rapidly deprived of its ordinary way of expressing connection to their deceased loved ones, as well as a sense of protection from heavenly guardians. They were clearly starving for some way to communicate feelings about ‘the beyond’, and to find hope in the darkening, colder days.

‘Halloween’, really a modern döppleganger of All Hallow’s Eve, quickly became a popular national custom – a world custom, indeed, due to US influence. It took from Christianity that otherwordly atmosphere – but it did not jettison any of the customs that had arisen since the Reformation, and which were themselves continuations of folky responses to the coming of Winter; Samhain is almost certainly a part of that background here, even if it is not a direct connection, as we have seen.

This Halloween mystery has a twist, then. Here is really a mutant of a festival that belongs to no one in particular - and that is the point. One could really call it one of modern pluralistic society’s great achievements. It has taken over management of this eerie season from the church, and arguably made a successful shared custom out of it. On the other hand, it is arguably consumeristic, tacky and frequently immoral: it was only a few years ago that supermarket costumes allowing people to dress as ‘mentally ill’ showcased this shallowness.

So, as a Christian, I have some regrets that Christianity does not really ‘own’ modern Halloween, anymore. Because the original All Hallows, as well as All Souls, seem to me to be a historic high point of confidence about our human fate. Here was a whole civilisation that seemed to announce to itself, every November, that death, human wickedness, and the Devil, were not in charge here – those who had died in Christ were now more fully alive; that no one is so beyond hope that they are not worth praying for. The darkening nights and colder air must have seemed less daunting to them.

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