Rugby League is popular sport with a significant following in NSW. In recent weeks, it has been very concerned with a ‘development’ called ‘the grapple tackle’ in which it seems elements of the wrestling code have made League a little more like Thugby than Rugby as players have been immobilized by an increasingly suspect neck-tackle. As the Ref used to say in World Championship Wrestling, ‘Break that hold Murphy’ — but Skull Murphy would always get away with it to the hisses and boos of the crowd. AFL on the other hand, that game played with a slippery butter-ball and elements of Irish frenzy, has always had an ‘around the neck free-kick’ and seems more dedicated to free-running, kicking and leaping than the heavy duty crash-tackle. It is clearly the Ballet of Ballgames.

In the last couple of weeks, the Grapple Tackle has been edged from the media by revelations concerning Andrew Johns of the Newcastle Knights — one of the greatest exponents of the modern game. His drug bust in London has been followed by a media interview in which years of drug use were disclosed; along with the fact that the man has been dealing with Bi-polar as ‘the most severe form of a depressive disorder’. In this setting, the use of drugs (perhaps Ecstasy and Cocaine) has paralleled a use of alcohol as a self-medicating reaction to a distinctive and disturbed experience of reality — or unreality as it were. Adjunct articles in the press then tell us about the hundreds of thousands of Australians whose life experience is shaped by mental illness — and this has been a hot topic over the last few years, particularly as prominent and successful individuals front up ‘to what it feels like to be a human being’.

I would like to make a few more comments.

Firstly, it is hard for people who are not media driven to understand the realities for those who live and breathe in that world. The world of Rugby League seems to be as much a world of media and television as it is of sport and athleticism. There is a well trodden pathway from playing field to the studios of Channel Nine and yesterday’s greats on the field are clearly groomed and selected for post-playing stardom of another kind, and very big money and big business is involved. In this respect, it is interesting to note that Andrew Johns laid his soul bare before the audience, before the congregation of the footy faithful gathered at the ‘crystal altar’ of the LCD flat panel. The confession and plea was transparently revealing, disclosed all, and left the penitent purged and gutted, but unburdened of years of ‘secret’ wrong-doing by which he was clearly troubled. It was a moment of deep division in a human soul, of a man saying ‘that is part of me, of what I became, but it is not the real me, not the best me, not the me I want to be’.

Perhaps in another age, a man would have gone off to priest or godly pastor, unburdened his soul in secret and received private counsel, forgiveness and encouragement to make amends and begin afresh; even acknowledging that addictive behaviors can be hard to ‘kill and then resurrect as new strengths of character’. Perhaps in a media age, the public and the viewers have become the gods and it is their pardon alone, their understanding, their absolution that a man who is a star needs. Perhaps it is this that is the advised remedy anyway. The whole episode and its wider implications for the culture of this Sport and its Media are indicative of the basic qualities (spiritual, ethical, and personal) that all men and women need in the modern jungle of life.

Wayne Bennett, the Brisbane Bronco’s coach, kept pushing the media on this, asking why it was that the rugby players alone seemed to get the media fascination with wrongdoing and misdemeanors – and that this fascination was not spread across every profession. Perhaps this says something with base level human desires and fantasies about the god-like adulation given to athleticism and wealth.

I felt sympathy for Andrew Johns — and thought it a mistake that he was purged in the public lounge room space of the Channel Nine audience and left totally exposed to the gaze of all. I also think that even with the best intentions, it makes the media complicit in that — as if for a reality show, Cardinal Pell would permit a camera in the confessional to audio and video the sadness and wrongs of all those seeking forgiveness for wrongdoing and a fresh start. He now has the task of living as a public penitent and public exemplar of Bipolar.

Few people had any idea what was going on, nor that there was a gap between what they were seeing (a top athlete leading from the front and doing impressively well over a great playing career) and the inner, felt reality.

A characteristic of his affliction is its inner or hidden core and the felt need of an able person to mask and deflect — or seek pseudo-remedies in self-medicating and dangerous behavior. This seems to feed on a sense of ‘Inwardly, I am not what I seem to you to be’. Masking and deflecting skills can contain and conceal the inner self and its moods and serve to keep other people out or ‘over the horizon’ of feeling, affect and immediacy. This can be helpful. It can be its own dangerous duality, leading to a split between the inner an outer person.

Bi-Polar seems to traverse a pendulum swing from frozen inertia and inactive down mood on the one hand to elated hyper-creative bursts of sparkling energy and excessive creativity; sometimes dissociated from normal rationality. Sometimes the creativity might not be worthy of the name creative. Deep moods, drives and appetites are either engaged with ‘too much energy’ (mania) or with ‘too little energy’ (inertia), and the process is marked by a lack of voluntary control - in other words, ‘I am taken where I do not wish to go and in ways that I cannot control or effectively moderate’. Researchers seek pharmacological treatments directed to brain states, and cognitive and conversational therapies.

But most human reality shares in a dual or polar structure where opposite ends of a spectrum are both needed to make sense of reality. Bi-polar is about opposite and unregulated energy levels, but almost all reality has a doubleness to it. Maybe the ‘energy axis’ is one key domain? We can polarize and pair up such opposites as love and hate, desire and indifference, loneliness and the desire to be desired, justice and lawlessness, friendship and enmity, starvation and gluttony, wisdom and stupidity, light and dark, and good and evil, sin and sanctity, being and the void, Grange and sour vinegar, waking and sleeping. In the Gospel stories of long ago, God and Satan are both there as dualities in an ambiguous field of human life.

All of which suggests the need for a normal symbolization and order of polarity, polarity as normal to the human situation and the need to live in balance ‘in between’, ‘in the midst’ and perhaps the energy dimension relevant to bi polar runs through all these dual fields that make up human life. It will no doubt affect them all if it switches on uncontrollably.

We can struggle to understand not only the significant other person in life with whom we are in ‘polar and dynamic relationship’ but also struggle to understand oneself. It is not necessarily true that one has untrammeled access to ‘who and what one really is’. It is strange to think that I can be a blind spot to my own self, or that my own self cannot see itself to well, cannot self-reflexively consider its own identity.

As a Priest, I believe that we are set in a greater Polarity, a greater duality of sorts, in which the world in which we live, which seems so real and so transitory at the same time, is not ‘all that there is’. All is open to the God who both sustains and redeems. John’s Gospel talks about this God as a God who advocates for us (speaks and acts for us) and comforts. The God does this through the complete gift of Jesus as the one who sends the Spirit and who ‘Is thus for us’ today.

The practice of the Christian religion in which the sacrament or effective sign of the bread and wine is enacted is a great stabilizing ‘symbolic act’ in the midst of human life. There is bread, yes, and the body of Jesus. The wine and the Lord’s life-blood. Here is both life and death combined in one living symbol. Here is an act that says ‘I remember a specific man. I remember His death, the death of an innocent. I remember his life, the life of the innocent. I imagine his being called from death in resurrection. I imagine his disclosure as the living human centre in which the God chose to be revealed. I see and know here in this Bread and this Cup universal and polar opposites, death and life, packaged and presented as life and hope and stability and comfort for me – I see a meal that embraces the large and entire story of human life both in history and in my own journey into adulthood and truth’.