Surrounding Matter
It’s called a lie. The way the ball sits on the surface when it stops rolling, whether on the edge of a green where the tight stubble gives way to loopy blades, or in the center of a sand trap with barely a dimpled shell poking out above the grains. The lie informs what happens next. Which club to use, what stance to take, how hard to swing. So much depends.
On and off a golf course, it almost always does.
Summers in the small town where I grew up were a hot-bed for old-fashioned church revivals. Five-day, seven-day, ten-day spiritual Come-to-Jesuses were as common as the pump jacks that dotted the landscape. Buildings that housed respective religious denominations—the Assembly of God on Sinclair, First Baptist on the side street between the school and main, the “anti” Church in the middle of town next to a park atop a hill—bulged on sultry weeknights, when they typically sat concave, with members who’d been tasked to come and bring a friend. Most folks in town already attended church somewhere, so these “revivals” or “gospel meetings” as they were often called, were town-wide games of Red Rover. A Baptist would go to the First Christian, a Pentecostal would go to the Assembly of God, a Methodist would go to the Church of Christ and so on. Bible carrying “tourists” crisscrossed their way about town in the sweltering summer heat mapping a Star of David with their steps.
I remember one summer’s topic, “Situational Ethics,” creating quite a stir. Though I don’t recall which denomination first focused on it, I can still hear bits of the conversations it ignited that caught fire and kept rekindling for months after the visiting preachers had moved on across to Arkansas. “You can’t just obey the Bible when you feel like it.” “It’s not okay to choose to follow the commandments we like and ignore the ones we don’t.” “This is just the devil’s way of tricking us into justifying sin.”
The collective protective radar of our tiny town glowed on red alert.
Developed by Joseph Fletcher in the 60s, the moral framework of “Situational Ethics” balanced on a list of “isms.” (Pragmatism, relativism, positivism, personalism.) And, like most things, it had its share of drawbacks. Especially when people grabbed parts of it and took off running. Everything gets wonky when stretched to its extremes.
The philosophy, still spiritedly debated today, when applied to scripture does make the teachings of Jesus seem more like suggestions than commandments, but the hull of the ethical movement in the world beyond the Bible proves airtight.
Context does matter. If not for any other reason than it helps us get to grace.
One of the most iconic shots in professional golf lore is Tiger’s on the Par 3 at the Masters in 2005. Faced with a tight lie (grass so short you could scarcely get a club head underneath), he chose to chip it high and let the ball trickle down the slope toward the hole. Aiming at an old pitch mark around the size of a penny, he landed the ball about 25 feet to the left of the cup. When the ball hit, it checked, taking a sharp right turn at the apex of the slope toward the pin. What the world remembers is the immediate hush that enveloped Augusta as the Nike ball slowly turned over and over before pausing dramatically at the edge of the cup, swish a blazing, before theatrically dropping in.
We marbleized the moment because of how it ended. But what made that shot iconic was what Tiger did with his lie.
We bury the lead sometimes—okay, we do it a lot—when a story suits our purpose or fits easily without tucking in the corners for a narrative that has some social steam. We forget to look around and take the different factors in.
Decisions do depend. They rest on all kinds of amorphous things.
It’s easy to sweep situations into categories that are comfortable over-simplifications of stories we’ve heard before. It’s easy to sit on a throne and take a side. But very few sets of circumstances are ever the same. Not precisely. Positioning is as unique to a person as a print is to a finger. And even then, nuance lies between the visible lines.
Liberally applied, Joseph Fletcher’s thesis seems to point toward a bias of love. Perhaps his situational architecture was an attempt to try to steer us toward a by-pass circumventing judgement—instead of a get-out-of-jail-free card—an allowance for the facts we don’t have the purview to see.
It matters where our feet are, what the wind is doing, the stick we select, how fast we choose to swing it, what we do with our follow-through. What doesn’t matter quite so much is how any of us got to where we are. What is important is that we stay attuned to our lie.