Modern Rituals – How We Worship Without Religion

The Idol and the Tribe (Part 4/10)

When I sit in a sports stadium, I feel the pull of the tribe. The chants, the flags, the sea of strangers erupting together – it is less about the eleven men on the field and more about the belonging. The team is an emblem of us. Their victory is our victory. Their failure wounds us together.

But when I watch PV Sindhu stretch across the court for an impossible smash, or Federer and Nadal push each other beyond exhaustion, something else happens. The roar is not tribal – it is reverent. The focus narrows to a single body, a single will. I am not cheering for a community; I am beholding an idol. For those moments, the athlete is no longer ordinary. They seem almost divine.

This difference fascinates me. Team games bind me to solidarity, the weaving of thousands of voices into one chorus. Individual performances lift me into awe, showing me what a single human body and spirit can become under years of discipline. Both move me, but in utterly different ways.

And perhaps that is why I travel for both. A match is a secular pilgrimage – to gather with the tribe, to lose myself in the chorus. An individual performance is another kind of pilgrimage – to witness the near-divine in human form. In both cases, I leave changed.

The tribe binds me. The idol lifts me. And between the two, I find myself again – human, yearning for transcendence together and alone.

Isn’t that what prayer does too? Sometimes we pray together – the same words, the same chants, the same gestures, binding us into one body. Sometimes we pray alone – in silence or with whispered words, lifting a single heart toward the divine. Team games and individual performances mirror this rhythm. One gathers us. The other lifts us. Both are prayers, in their own way.