Spin-Kicking For Jesus And Other Karate Moves
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Photo by Ashima Pargal
(OPINION) When my son John was about 10 or 11, we took karate together. Every Saturday, we’d head to Lexington, Kentucky, about 35 miles from our home, for our weekly class.
My memory has a great many gaping holes in it, but as best I can recall, the class was made up mainly of white-belt beginners such as John and me, maybe 20 people, from kids to adults.
I enjoyed karate a great deal. I liked our teacher. The routines we had to memorize (called “katas”) and even the warm-ups were great exercises that improved my balance and core strength.
I might have stayed with it, but about 18 months in, John grew more infatuated with baseball than martial arts and wanted to concentrate his attention there. I didn’t want to take karate without him — for me it was a father-son activity — so we dropped out.
By then, we were green belts studying for our brown belts, roughly halfway to becoming black belts. We weren’t the first to quit. By the time we left, the class already had dwindled noticeably. Folks just wandered away. Of the original members, three or four eventually stayed long enough to earn their black belts.
At roughly the same time John and I were involved in karate, I worked with a guy who was a first-degree black belt in a different karate school and was studying for his second-degree. To me, a lowly green belt, he seemed to reside in the martial arts pantheon alongside Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris and Billy Jack.
But one day, as we were water-cooler talking, I asked him how many street thugs at a time he figured he could whup up on if it ever came to that. The black belts in the movies could take down a half-dozen bad guys without spilling their beer.
He paused to think. Given the stage he’d reached, he said, if one lone mugger or bully ever accosted him, he’d have a fair-to-middling chance of protecting himself. Maybe. If he got lucky.
This answer surprised me. As I interpreted it, he was saying that after several years of diligent study — he was way more devoted than John and I — he believed he was just starting to grasp karate’s basic principles well enough to use them.
I saw him as a grandmaster. He apparently saw himself as hardly a beginner.
That’s stuck with me.
I’ve come to think it applies to many pursuits beyond karate — including spirituality, the thing I’ve spent all my professional time and possibly too much of my private time thinking about.
A lot of people — hordes, in fact — feel some amorphous pull toward the spiritual. There’s the old saying that all people are born with a God-shaped hole in them and only God can fill it.
At some point in their lives many folks become seekers. They might decide to read spiritual books. Or they return to the church of their youth. Or they take a course in comparative religion. Or they start a routine of prayer, meditation or chanting. Maybe they do several of these things.
That’s wonderful. Even the most exalted guru — even the pope himself — had to start somewhere. We’re all beginners in the beginning. We’re all white belts. We’re all embarking on the spiritual version of wax on, wax off, to borrow from “The Karate Kid.”
People typically undertake their quest with a sense of curiosity and enthusiasm, maybe even a smidgeon of wonder. What if there really is something out there? How will I know? What will it feel like? How will it change me?
But just as we all have to start at the beginning, we all have to grow. And growth takes time. It takes perseverance. It involves making sacrifices. It requires trial and error. It takes self-discipline and self-awareness. We slowly move from our spiritual white belt to our yellow belt. From yellow to blue. From blue to green.
We make mistakes repeatedly. We perform the same rituals time and again. Pray the same prayers. Parse the same archaic texts. Get sucked into the same tired arguments.
And so, most people sooner or later get bored. They get mad. They see another shiny path to follow (ballroom dancing!). They find the challenges progressively tougher and can’t muster the effort.
There are myriad reasons to quit a spiritual pilgrimage. A great majority of pilgrims will drop out along the way.
Still, a promise remains for those who keep going: there’s enlightenment out there if you want it.
And even if we never achieve Enlightenment with a capital E, if we never become gurus or grandmasters (and we probably won’t), all along the journey God grants us smaller gifts — spiritual pearls, epiphanies — that make the trek worthwhile.
Incrementally, we may even find ourselves “transformed from glory to glory,” as the Bible says.
There’s always just enough reward to keep us pressing on toward the next fresh revelation.
Really, that’s the amazing part: There’s no end to what the spirit can teach us. I told my congregation the other day that I’ve been on this quest nearly 50 years, and I feel I’ve only recently scratched the surface. I’m like that long-ago black belt colleague who was just getting the hang of karate.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.