Running the Race of Life

It is worth remembering that looks fade and skills deteriorate, that neither form nor function nor perfection matter as much as completion and wholeness. St. Paul didn’t say, “I won the race” but rather, “I finished the race.” In the end we are encouraged to remember that it is not about how many trophies we capture, souls we win, or jewels we earn for our crown in the hereafter but about these questions: Did we do what we could to help the least of us even when the least of us is ourselves? Did we choose the unchosen to be on our teams and in our lives? Did we give cups of cool water and feed the sheep? We were commissioned to do these things.

The sacred suggests that God is looking at us. The holy, as Rumi writes, “is nearer to you than the look in your eye,” or in the words of Tennyson, as Randall Stewart notes, “closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet,” transcendent yet immediately present at once. The holy invites us, like Ishmael in Moby Dick, to seek possibility rather than certainty, to let go of our preconceptions, our vanity, prizes, and public place, because in the end we will all travel light. And what do we know for sure? All we can do is grasp this world lightly and let go of our sacred training wheels with humor, humility and gratitude.
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From Robert J. Higgs and Michael Braswell.  An Unholy Alliance: The Sacred and Modern Sports published by Mercer University Press.
 
“It is worth remembering that looks fade and skills deteriorate . . . that neither form nor function nor perfection matter as much as completion and wholeness.”