RIP, Reggie White

Non-sports fans may not know that much about Reggie White. The best defensive end of my lifetime (and probably yours, no matter how old you are), White died of a heart attack this morning at age 43. His life should be remembered, though, and it’s the last couple of years that are the most important.

White was an ordained minister, and he was always quite vocal about his religious beliefs. As a football star, he had a platform to extoll the virtues of God for anyone that listened, and he always took that opportunity. He frequently found himself at pulpits doing the same, but his place at the pulpits was not because of his standingas a theologian. Instead, it was because he was famous, and people figured that he could pull worshippers into church. And, as we all know, more worshippers means more people chipping in to the plate.
It’s pimpin’ when it comes to these athletes/ministers. Many of them are no more schooled on the holy texts than anyone else, but they have a place in the market that allows them to draw people in and make people a lot of money. In the last few years, Reggie came to understand that. He realized that he did not know as much about Christianity as he felt he should. He realized that he frequetly overstated the role God played in his life, mistakenly saying that God told him to do things that he decided to do himself. At the end of his life, Reggie got that. He was up on the hustle, how he was part of the hustle, and how he managed to hustle himself.
So what did Reggie do? He got quiet, got some books, and decided to learn more. He decided to make his relationship with God more personal. He went so far as to begin to learn Hebrew so he could read scriptures in their original form, all so he could figure these things out on his own. He decided that he would, as much as he could, eliminate the man-made component of his faithand develop a personal, nuanced understanding of his religion.
That freedom of thought is to be respected. So many people take what they’re given in church as absolute truth, never bothering to challenge what is fed to them. As a non-Christian, one whose aversion to Christianity comes from folks’ refusal to question what they’re thought, I gained an intense respect for Reggie White because he was willing to do that. As a 43 year-old man, he took the time to re-educate himself, doing things that most people stop to consider after childhood–he tried to take himself to the next level as a thinker.
Though it’s too late for him to read himself, I give Reggie his props. In death, I wish him peace. In life, I hope that more of us can have the courage to acknowlege what we don’t know, thereby enabling us to learn what we need to figure out.