The Feeling in the Streets

I am not, by any honest accounting, a sports fan. I couldn’t tell you the Knicks’ starting lineup and I’m not sure I could tell you how many six (or seven!) foot tall folks are on the court at any given time. But I lived in New York City for seventeen years and the city still holds a piece of my heart, so when the Knicks won it all last weekend, I found myself reading a New York Times piece about the celebration with tears in my eyes.

The writer, Matt Flegenheimer, didn’t describe the game. He described the feeling of it. He wrote about people hugging strangers so hard they went airborne, the man on a bus-stop bench announcing history to no one and everyone, children cursing vanquished opponents (forgive them, Father…), and the people in the back half of life who felt like kids again because that’s what they were the last time they had a hometown win like this.

What struck me wasn’t the basketball. It was the embodiment of it all. My feed was full of joy that could not be doomscrolled or optimized and could not be generated by anything but actual humans pressed together in actual streets.

We are told, relentlessly, that the future is screens and synthetic and coming at us like an unstoppable freight train. This day is already awash with headlines designed to keep us afraid (and clicking). It’s a combination that leaves me feeling flat — and I wonder, can you relate? It’s something like a low hum of what’s the point and the acedia that the desert fathers warned about long before there were algorithms to worry about.

And then, just like that, a city of strangers climbs a stoplight together and collectively remembers it is a living, breathing thing of beauty, demonstrating a powerful antidote to the artifice all around us. I keep returning to the fact that we were made for this. Not for the dopamine drip of our phones but for collective, embodied, costliness of joy. It’s a joy that only arises from showing up together and, I’d argue, one that has deeply biblical roots.

In Genesis, God looks at what he has made and calls it good. For all that he created, we humans – imago dei – are the only part of his creation that can stand in a crowd and weep at something made all the more beautiful because it took years of failure to earn, just like happened at Madison Square Garden this weekend.

I don’t fully know what to do with this. After all, it’s “only” a game we’re talking about. But I also don’t think the longing I felt reading that article was nothing. In fact, I think it was a true thing shining through a small thing, illuminating something profound in the process.

So I’ll leave you with one question I’m sitting with myself, for your own reflection or to kick around the next time you’re lingering at a table with friends: When was the last time you let yourself be undone by in-real-life joy? And what would it cost you to go looking for that again, especially when so much of the world points us in the other direction?