A recent thread asked about a relationship between religion and triathlon. I didn’t want to get buried 32 posts into that thread, so I thought I would start a new one… not as a religious debate, but rather just to share one of my favorite all-time quotations on being an athlete. This is from Dr. George Sheehan’s book Running and Being:
The problem of God has moved from the ancient question, “Does God exist?” past the medieval inquiry, “What is He like?” to our present dilemma, “Why did He create the world?” Our difficulty now is the inability to explain the existence of the world, and therefore ourselves. We are unable to define our purpose, to show how we serve, to demonstrate our usefulness.
The best answer, it seems to me, is to consider Calvin’s thought that the world is *“theatrum Gloria Dei.” *We are here, then, to glorify God. And we do this by glorifying the God who is Himself a player. Who created in joy and play and sport.
Heed your inner calling to play. Listen, if you can, to the person you were and are and are meant to be. Then do what you do best and feel best at. Something that you would do for nothing. Something that gives you security and acceptance and a feeling of completion; even moments when you are fused with your universe and your Creator. When you find it build your life around it.
You may notice that play can be painful and strenuous and dangerous. It can demand endurance and suffering and perseverance. It can ask the most a person has to give. Play, you see, can be more difficult than work.
It is, however, worth every effort. What better than to be a player in the hands of a playful God?
Dr. George Sheehan; Running and Being
(not meant to start another debate. reply to me off-line if you wish)
Actually, it made me think of this one by Pic de la Mirandole that describe of what happened in the garden of Eden at the moment in which God created man:
Therefore, when everything was done… there was not among his archetypes that from which he could fashion a new offspring, nor was there in his treasure-houses anything which he might bestow on his new son as an inheritance… At last the best of artisans ordained that creature to whom he had been able to give nothing proper should have joint possession of whatever had been peculiar to each of the different kinds of being. He therefore took man as creature of indeterminate image and, assigning him a place in the middle of the world, addressed him thus: "Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam, to the end that according to thy longing and according to thy judgment thou mayest have and possess what abode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shalt desire…The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine free will, in whose hand we have placed thee, shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature. We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lowest forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn in the higher forms, which are divine"