March 2024
Change That Counts
Every athlete must keep all his appetites under control; and he does it to win a crown that fades, whereas ours is imperishable.
Saint Paul used an athletic analogy to make his salvific point. Today, one hesitates to do likewise. The descent of corporatised sports into woke lunacy and cancel culture is draining away the joy and inspiration they once provided.
Politicised sporting clubs and sports media berate hapless punters with endless "diversity" propaganda and "inclusion" campaigns pushing them to change: i.e., to jettison their natural aversion to unnatural, dangerous, and sinful "lifestyles." England's Premier League football authorities even run a sinister unit that secretly monitors 'dissident' fans, documenting not only their transgender-critical social media posts but their physical whereabouts, daily habits and "vulnerabilities." For simply expressing an online opinion at odds with gender ideology one female fan became the subject of a thumping 11-page dossier. Banned from attending Newcastle United games until 2026, she later discovered that she had been tracked/stalked in this Stasi-like, not-so "inclusive" fashion for four months. (Daily Mail, 3/2/24)
Only rare men and women possess the courage and principled moral backbone to resist this amoral juggernaut of Alinksyite change-agents dressed up as sporting executives: woke execs who pay their hefty wages. And yet, all that said and notwithstanding the unconscionable sums of money that also corrupt and corrode the sports' industry, the sporting life per se remains full of laudatory lessons. Not least that people can change, radically, for the better. With iron will and discipline bad habits of a lifetime can be overcome. Top sportsmen do it all the time.
During a 2013 interview, retired professional golfer Don January recalled how, as a Texan teenager in 1945, he had watched the legendary Ben Hogan hook his shots terribly. By the time he saw him play again in 1949 his swing was perfect and "he killed everybody." Someone close to Hogan later told him that "Ben would come in about 9:00, have breakfast and then go to the practice tee and hit balls until about 12:30 and then he’d have lunch and then he’d go back out on the practice tee at 1:30 and hit balls until about 5:00. Try that on for size for about five years," said January. "That’s how he changed his swing and his game. Hard, hard work to get rid of that duck hook."
To improve his own game, January went even further and changed his entire character! With remarkable self-discipline he overcame his naturally speedy disposition, learning to walk, talk, and act at a slower pace. This in turn slowed down his swing and on-course demeanour (also helping him ditch a 45-year smoking habit). The transformation produced many victories.
If this total change to win a perishable crown can be effected successfully with "hard work" on the purely natural plane, how much greater (and easier) are the supernatural Lenten gains won by hard sacramental work. The key is to keep your eye firmly fixed on heaven. As St Paul exhorted his little flock at Corinth: "You know well enough that when men run in a race, the race is for all, but the prize for one; run, then, for victory." To which he added instructions to attain it: "Do not run aimlessly"; "Do not run... like a man in doubt of his goal"; "Do not fight [your] battle like a man who wastes his blows on the air." In other words, to win salvation, run towards the Light with confidence and focus.
This is not so easy in an era of pestilential Modernism infested with ecclesiastics and laity running in the wrong direction, aimless and uncertain, beating the Modernistic air they breathe, neither striving for the salvific prize nor standing to fight but playing to the worldly woke. The only change they know is mindless 'change for change's sake' — the "progressive" motto tatooed on their hapless souls. By God's grace, we know better: that the only change that counts is our total transformation under grace.
So, this Lent, amid the utter chaos in Church and State, let us refocus our souls on the self-discipline exhorted by St Paul: prayer and penance that strengthens our resolve, magnifies our goal, and effects the radical change that ensures eternal victory!