When she was ordained as an Episcopal priest in 2000, the Rev. Joanne Sanders expected to minister to a small community of parishioners. But her work as an assistant dean for religious life has taken her from the pulpit in Memorial Church to the 50-yard line at Stanford Stadium; and in February, she’ll travel to Salt Lake City to serve on a multifaith team of 40 chaplains for the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Stanford: You’ll be working in the Olympic Village, and you’ll be doing—what?
I really don’t know what to expect. It’s my understanding that they’ve built some kind of interfaith chapel and we’ll be offering religious services there. But beyond that, there will be personal needs. The athletes will have crises in their lives, or in their families’ and friends’ lives. You never know what might come up, let alone the uncertainty about terrorism.
You competed as an athlete in college and you coached collegiate tennis for eight years in Arizona before enrolling in divinity school. So you must have given a lot of thought to the relationship between sports and spiritual matters.
The connection between body, mind and spirit is so important—they really can’t be separated. And I’m more convinced every day about the spirituality of athleticism, and find myself asking, ‘Is sport itself a form of spirituality? If so, what’s it tapping into?’ I think about the kind of pressure, sacrifice and discipline that it takes to get to the Olympics, and I realize that there’s a sense of vulnerability in these elite athletes.
Do you work closely with the athletics department?
Teaching and coaching have always been near and dear to my heart, and I’ve been talking with Ted Leland and various coaches about developing a sensitivity to the diversity of student-athletes we have—Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Jewish. We’ve got young people who, for perhaps the first times in their lives, have a chance to explore and ask questions about who and what God is—and is not—and why they should care.
What about the request you got prior to the Arizona State University ) ) football game last fall?
The first home game was canceled after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and the athletics department called before the ASU game and said they’d like a two-minute inspirational speech. So there I was in the middle of the field, projected on the JumboTron, trying to use what I would call universalist language, using names for God like Holy One and Source of All Comfort. It was a very delicate thing to do in a public venue, and I kept thinking, ‘Oh, boy, if my mother could see me now.’
