An Olympic ideal
Originally appeared on spirituality.com
For all the complexity and commercialization swirling around the run up to the Olympic Games, there remains at the heart of the Games a wonderful, and wonderfully simple, ideal: the pursuit of excellence.
In sport, as in the rest of life, it’s a pursuit that lifts us all. Potentially, and sometimes actually, it fuels a healthy spirit of global competition and, at the same time, of cooperation among both athletes and spectators. Often, this ideal fosters a kind of oasis in which the games become—however briefly—a refuge from a world that seems overburdened with troubles.
I can go for years at a time without keeping track of who won the World Cup in figure skating, freestyle skiing, or skeleton. Hey, I can go for years at a time and not even know if they have a World Cup for some Olympic events.
But when the games roll around, I get fired up. Probably lots of things factor into that. Mostly, though, I think it goes back to that ideal: the pursuit of excellence. The possibility of seeing the greatest athletes on the planet giving the finest performance of their careers. The likelihood that before the 17 days are history, someone will travel faster, higher, farther, more exquisitely, than anyone in that sport ever has.
It’s about pushing back limits. It’s about the highest of aspirations getting translated into the greatest of accomplishments. And in that, I think, there is a spiritual underpinning to what goes on at the games. It’s the spiritual view of a person that captures his or her true promise. It’s the glimpse of an individual as created by the great Creator that highlights his or her real potential.
Those views, and the performances that come from such a limitless perspective, inspire the rest of us, athletes and non-athletes alike, to train harder, strive more consistently, labor more devotedly, to be all that the Creator made us to be.
During what we think of as a much simpler era, a time when the Olympic Games of ancient Greece were a fixed part of that society’s landscape, St. Paul wrote, “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain.”
The pursuit of excellence, plainly, has been around for a long time. But I wonder if we need it, and the games, even more than Paul’s contemporaries.
Glimpses of our true nature as the sons and daughters of God—brimming over with the boundless capacities He’s established in each of us—stand as invaluable counterpoints to the tawdry pictures too often pushed before us today. Those glimpses remind us of the excellence that’s achievable in a whole range of worthy endeavors. And, hopefully, those glimpses prod us to greater effort, in sports, in business, in efforts to better care for our planet and for one another.
Mary Baker Eddy, a spiritual visionary and a tireless worker of 19th and early 20th century, once wrote, “There is no excellence without labor; and the time to work, is now. Only by persistent, unremitting, straightforward toil; by turning neither to the right nor to the left, seeking no other pursuit or pleasure than that which cometh from God, can you win and wear the crown of the faithful.” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, p. 340 )
Perhaps even more than in years past I look forward to the Olympic Games. Naturally, I pray for games that are safe. Beyond that, I look forward to glimpses of excellence that illustrate God’s wondrous creation. I look forward to instances in which His sons and daughters go beyond what were once considered unpierceable limits.
That, I believe, can inspire the rest of us to throw off a few more limitations ourselves.
Striving for excellence:
Science and Health
288:27-28
King James Bible
I Cor. 9:24