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Dear saints,
I hope that you have had an opportunity as some point this week to enjoy coverage of the Summer Olympic Games in Paris. When it comes to the Olympics, I have a somewhat old fashioned outlook—I'd rather the games still be reserved for amateurs. As you may well be aware, from the inception of the modern games in 1896, Olympians had to sign an affidavit swearing that they had never been paid for playing sports. Of course, the Olympics were far from a classless society, as only those with the means could travel to compete let alone meet other costs. Over the first decades of the games, several athletes were either stripped of their medals or barred from future games when it was discovered they had been paid for other sporting endeavors beyond the games, including Native American Jim Thorpe, whose golds were denied him, won in the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912 when it was later discovered that he had been paid $2 to play baseball in college. To put that in perspective, the current US Olympic men's basketball team earns about $700 million a year in salary and endorsements. In hindsight, perhaps Jim could have been given a pass.
Don't get me wrong, there is a strange kind of pleasure in watching LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Steph Curry crush all and every opposition on their inevitable march to gold in Paris, yet it is not for me where the real glory of the games resides. For me, that is in the story of athletes like Adriana Ruano, who at age 16 suffered a back injury that prematurely ended her career as a gymnast, but then switched sports to shooting and this week secured Guatemala's first ever gold. Or in the story of Team GB (Great Britain) rower Georgina Brayshaw, who also won gold this week, the culmination of a journey that began as a seven year old who fell off a horse and for eight days was in a coma even after which doctors were unsure if she would ever walk again. Or it is in the multiply-layered stories of the Refugee Olympic Team members who describe how sport gave to their lives purpose they once believed had been forever lost. I love that the Olympic Games is about all comers, from all over the world, people with all manner of paths that have led them there. I love that the Games has the power to remind us that the human spirit and the human body is capable of truly remarkable things—something that I find becomes even more abundantly evident in the Paralympics that will soon follow.
As we look to the days and weeks before us—from kids going back for a new school year, to the spiraling conflict in the Middle East—it is important to remember that all of us—not just elite athletes—are brimming with promise and possibility. I have to believe that peace is possible in war-ravaged parts of the world just as I have to believe that decency and respect is possible in our domestic politics. That is because I wholeheartedly believe that this is, above all else, God's world. God is in the relentless drive that the "one-day" Olympic athlete feels to get up and push themselves to their limits over and over again. God is in the immovable hope that certain stalwart Palestinians and Israelis still have for peace in their lands. We hope because we have faith and places like All Saints' exist in part to perpetuate a conspiracy of hope upon the earth—not a hope held in vain but a hope grounded in the grace and mercy of God.
So, three cheers for all those who are yearning to be faster, higher and/or stronger over these coming days. And thanks be to God for the ways their endeavors remind us all that we are each made to reach for the promise of what could be.
Peace,
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