By RAY WADDLE
      
As a football fan, I will catch the Super Bowl tomorrow and root for Peyton Manning’s Colts and their nice-guy coach and hope the Titans land there next year.
      
As a writer, I will sit there and try once again to make sense of a super-sized spectacle that has become an emblem of American values. I am confident I will fail. The thing is bigger than words.
      
Super Bowl XLI – the Roman numerals imply imperial proportions -- is a mid-winter festival now rivaling New Year’s and Mardi Gras. It is as if pro football owners decided to drape themselves in ecclesiastical robes and invent one last sky-high blow-out defiance against the February darkness before the season of Lent comes a-calling.
      
This is the weekend of the year with the most home parties and the fewest weddings, says Michael MacCambridge in his first-rate book America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation. Only on Thanksgiving do Americans eat more. Super Bowl is the annual TV event most watched by men. And women.
      
Tomorrow is also the biggest sports gambling day of the year. On land, off shore and on line, serious and casual bettors will wager $4 billion on this game (according to estimates of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey) -- most of it illegal.
      
What is the National Football League in the scheme of things? It is a national unifying passion, embodying American enterprise, its exuberance, teamwork and ruthlessness. Pro football is an outlet for community spirit, beauty and violence. The game is about mastering chaos (the play-action pass), managing committee meetings (the huddle) and celebrating individualism (the sack, the break-away run, the 60-yard field goal).
      
The joyless gambling dimension confirms the reality of contemporary casino culture, where lotteries are an arm of public policy and anti-tax ideology, despite the family costs of addiction and debt. Frankly, one reason I prefer college football to NFL is the gambling plague. Visit a sports bar on college game-day Saturday, then on NFL Sunday. The Saturday crowd is boistrous but community-spirited. Among NFL viewers are usually a lot of gamblers. They are the ones carrying around the nervous anxiety, yelling bitterly at the TV screen, even when they are winning.
      
The NFL became our obsession after the mid-1960s. Thats also when church loyalties started declining. I am not blaming pro football, but perhaps quasi-religious emotions found a home on the gridiron. In a complicated world, people could watch human conflict resolved satisfactorily on a playing field, producing clear winners and losers, based on strategy and muscle, not mystery and theology.
      
If Super Sunday excess makes you uneasy, there is a good-hearted counterweight gaining steam: The Souper Bowl of Caring. By kick-off time, this national grassroots organization, started in 1990, hopes to raise $8 million in food and money for charity. Some 18,200 congregations and others are gathering cans of soup and donations.
      
At Bellevue Presbyterian Church, they hope to amass 1,000 cans and $1,000 for Second Harvest Food Bank.
        
“Souper Bowl has become an event, just like the Super Bowl is an event,” says Lee Cannon, of Bellevue church. “It makes the point that Super Bowl Sunday is more than just football. Theres a lot more to life than just football.”