Long live (in) the Olympics

Well, I guess I no longer have to wonder when I'll first miss my Wednesday deadline!  

Where on Earth did this week go?  And how did it get to be Thursday evening already?

And where did the Olympics go?  All week Japhia and I have spent a few moments each evening looking together at the empty TV screen, lamenting the end of the nightly feast of what great things men and women are capable of.

I wonder, what did you see of heroic humanity?  What lingers in your mind from the 17-day buffet of human achievement?

Did you see, for instance, the moment in the decisive sixth end of the gold-medal game of mixed-doubles curling, when after struggling through uncharacteristic nervousness and errors in the early game, John Morris passionately urges Kaitlyn Lawes on what ended up being the game- and medal-winning rock, to sweep "hard, Kaitlyn ... hard, Kaitlyn ... harder, Kaitlyn."  And she did.  And they won.

Or the much-anticipated perfect final skate by Scott Moir and Tessa Virtue, which they actually delivered for all the world to see?

Or the powerful final skate of Kaetlyn Osmond that won her a bronze medal only three years after planning to quit competitive skating because of injuries?

Or maybe something like the sight of the skeleton racers -- athletes sliding down an iced track at more than 100 kms/hour lying head-first on their stomach, unprotected save for a crash helmet, on the merest little sled that would barely hold a ten-year-old?

And do you also remember some of the commercials?  Like the one about the young woman born without complete legs, and the way in which the odds against her becoming a world champion downhill skier diminish and keep diminishing through miracle after miracle of the human spirit until she truly does become a champion?

Or the one about a young gay man who comes home to his mom with a figure skating flourish and a black eye he suffered at the hands of others who could not accept him, and a young woman wearing a hijab and ostracized for it by the other girls in her skating club, and the boy with a prosthetic foot struggling to be one with the other speed-skaters? All of whom maintain their passion, and win their chance and their place in the light?

It is amazing what the human spirit -- what we, are capable of, individually and together.

Sadly, no more Olympics until the summer of 2020 and the winter of 2022. 

But I wonder what will remain between now and then on the daily table of my life?  And what images and visions of true achievement and what glory of real humanity from the past few weeks will persist and be incarnated in my own days and nights of human-divine-olympian living?