Imago dei and a football player

The outpouring of support across the world for Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin following a catastrophic health event suffered during a Jan. 2 football game in Cincinnati has been nothing short of impressive, perhaps even miraculous.

The response is, for persons of faith, perhaps a concrete example of imago dei, the Latin form of the words "image of God."

As this column is penned, Hamlin is hospitalized and fighting for his life following cardiac arrest.

His heart stopped due to a blow to the chest during the first quarter of the Bills-Bengals contest.

Hamlin is from this columnist's neck of the woods.

He was born and reared in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, a suburban Pittsburgh town full of blue-collar working folks.

My late father worked 35 years for a steel company on nearby Neville Island.

As a family, we were no strangers to McKees Rocks and passed through it often as we visited Dad at work.

Hamlin, although he had scholarship offers from colleges with more impressive football traditions, chose to stay home and attend the University of Pittsburgh.

His desire, according to those close to the athlete, was to remain physically present for his younger brother during the latter's journey through adolescence and emerging teen years.

Hamlin wanted to be a father figure to his sibling since their dad was often absent, in part due to a stretch in prison.

A second-year safety with Buffalo, Hamlin did not forget his hometown.

His Chasing M's Foundation, launched in response to the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, has hosted toy drives, back-to-school drives and kids' camps since 2020, and any funds donated go toward those drives.

Before Hamlin's injury, the GoFundMe fundraising goal for Chasing M's was $2,500.

Within a day after being hurt, the amount pledged to the foundation soared to more than $5 million.

By any objective standard, the unique circumstance of Hamlin's injury and his personal story has touched hearts.

Money is concrete, measurable and gets our attention.

Don't dismiss the uncountable, however -- specifically, the news of praying people all over the world in support of this young man and his struggle to hold on to the slender thread that is life.

Now, back to imago dei.

The concept is based on Genesis 1:27, which reads, in the New Revised Standard Version, "So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

The verse is found in the first story of creation.

One theologian explains the passage with these words: "(This) does not mean God is in human form but rather humans are in the image of God in their moral, spiritual and intellectual nature. Humans mirror God's divinity in their ability to actualize the unique qualities with which they have been endowed -- and which make them different than all other creatures."

This language is a bit flowery for my taste, but the essence is this: there is spark of God latent within people that occasionally breaks to the surface and is empirically evident.

Sometimes we remember what is ultimately important and are moved to act upon this knowledge.

The image of God, to put it plainly, is sometimes viewable in people.

We can be awful to one another, and often are, but the spark, the image of God, is not obliterated in us.

Isn't that what we've all witnessed this past week after an athlete none of us has ever heard of got hurt?

I tend to think so.