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I confess I鈥檝e been ambivalent when it comes to rugby. Partly because my school made me play it instead of football, which I thought was pure snobbery at the time. It didn鈥檛 help, either, that I injured my neck scarily when a scrum collapsed.

But there is something about this brutally noble game - a decency, perhaps? - that will have me, like so many millions of others, glued to the World Cup Final this morning - albeit I鈥檒l still be watching through my fingers ... as those flying tackles can be equivalent to a head-on car-crash at 40 mph!

The head of rugby at St George鈥檚, Harpenden, whose school has delivered four players to the current England squad, spoke on this programme yesterday of his pupils living 鈥渂y the core values of the game - sportsmanship, respect, humility, rather than focusing on results.鈥�

You don鈥檛 just see but refreshingly you hear the respect of the professional players鈥� when the referees are miked up in these big matches!

And I鈥檓 sure Thomas Arnold, head of Rugby school when the game was established, would approve. He, and other influential Victorian clerics such as Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes (author of Tom Brown鈥檚 School Days) championed the link between physicality and faith in sport, and its overflow through acts of service in the community - all at a time when religion had begun to be more about saving souls than changing society.

That this movement latterly became known as 鈥榤uscular Christianity鈥�, with its associated Victorian promotion of empire, and machismo, reminds us that 鈥榖eliefs鈥� must always be open to scrutiny.

But something theologically robust remains about the embodiment of values, modelled well on the sports field, even as those social values rightly shift towards diversity, for example (and the England team is an improving example of this).

For me, too, the celebration of physicality itself matters - regardless of whether we鈥檙e 鈥榤uscular鈥� like the players, or not. Eric Liddell, the athlete and rugby international, famously said that when he ran, he felt God鈥檚 pleasure.

And when I kick a ball around with my daughters, or we head out for an autumn walk, and the blood pumps, and we activate our senses, I鈥檓 often conscious of the refrain, from the book of Genesis, that 鈥淕od saw that it was good鈥� - the divine earthiness of existence, from kicking through leaves to kicking a drop-goal in the dying moments of a World Cup Final, is holiness indeed, surely, when it helps us celebrate, together, the goodness of life.

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