Contests

Contests

            This writer has often described life as a hectic interlude in an otherwise peaceful non-existence. We end each day, go to bed believing ourselves victors from another contest. Aware of news broadcasts, killings from criminals, surviving highways, even the escape from certain treatments and medications (meningitis injection)...IF just eating healthy, exercising, purity in our thought processes, still fortunate not to be a victim. Man was born with a survival instinct-testing. "We know the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat." Many pay millions of dollars each year to sit either in the stands or in front of the television set to watch young-healthy millionaires challenge one another on the athletic field with every shape ball. This summer, London Olympic games, 10,820 Olympians contested one another for a gold, silver or bronze medal. This is healthy competition. Parents and grandparents thrive on seeing youngsters in the health-conduct of sports activity. Then, we have contests which should not thrill anyone....a 28 year old man, Coney Island, eating more hotdogs than any other contestant (62). This writer has never understood any glamour-glory of expensive cars always turning left, racing around a circle...spilling-killing. Perhaps the most disgusting contest, there may be one worse somewhere on earth, a 32 year old man eating insects-worms-roaches. It so happens that this ingestion of pests killed him almost instantly. The great 15th century monk, Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ, wrote, "I am what I am before God, no more, no less." I ask you, in the challenge of living, the healthy contest between one another-sports-business-professionals-even looks (beauty contests for women, fitness body building for men), should not common sense limit contest? I can understand wrestling (the moves, holes, etc.) but not the beating of one another by two men with boxing gloves. I can understand the accomplished ability after much practice, both failures and successes, pleasure with golf clubs, fencing swords, perhaps even walking a high wire. We understand that just driving down a two or more lane highway, where you are meeting fast traffic, most of the time, you are just six feet from almost certain death. But why do something so stupid as to kill yourself by eating insects? You run enough risk with microscopic insects eating you, without your even knowing it.

            So it is with warfare, earliest history, at least earliest biblical history, the children of Israel, humbled in the wilderness, with Joshua's leadership crossing the Jordan, conquering the seven tribal entities of a land of milk and honey. Most early civilizations avoided direct conflict, lived in walled cities. The 600,000 killed in American civil war were involved in direct, man to man-horse to horse, conflict. You were looking a fellow human being in the eyes when you used your sword on him and it was this way until WWII with the use of bayonets. There is a difference in warfare when close and personal, looking another man in the eyes before he is stabbed. The invention of fire-arms, breach loading equipment, cannons during the 18th century brought a new dimension to killing. Then, Alfred Nobel, his dynamite, bombs, explosives. Think of the paradox of Peace Awards being named for him.

            Even though the first born in the world, two brothers, one killed the other, warfare has been mostly a matter of control and power.

            The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand brought on WWI in 1914, 16 million deaths. A small German man, 25 inch waistline, Catholic alter boy, never the less believer in eugenics and the ratio of certain people, brought Hitler and the Nazi access powers to the front lines of WWII, deaths of over 60 million human beings. Does anyone have an imagination for a number in the next world war which has already started? Using drones, nuclear power experimentation which we can not even imagine. Most of the population of the world will be killed. Why, where, who, the contest?  Do we stop to consider that all people on earth have souls, souls which live forever?

            I still remember, still in college, Bible salesmen living in a rooming house on New Bridge Street in Jacksonville, NC, young marines coming to that house because this is where they kept their communication-loud speaker systems stored, making presentations of the gospel on Saturday nights. Just as with biblical characters, you must put flesh and blood on men who are involved in warfare. IF, as this writer, you could hear the screams of the wounded in hospitals, know the destitution of veterans whose lives are forever mangled, the true concept of contests..those which are healthy and those which are disastrous would become a reality not perception-figment of the imagination-romantic magnetite in someone's book.

            Those who think they are prepared for the contest of warfare, money in the bank, excess food in the pantry should know that the vile horrors of war can reach them easily. Thinking oneself safe in the bed, there is a very short distance between your earthly existence and your eternal welfare with God.

            Northeast of the Persian Gulf, a small village, a boy named Cyrus, thinking named by parents but named by God in order to fulfill the prophecy of both Isaiah and Jeremiah, was born. Just as surely as God had named John the Baptist, so he named Cyrus, long before his birth. In the Catholic chambers of eternity, long before the creation of the world and everything in it, God, in his eternal mind, constructed history. Each of us are just actors on the stage. In all your learning, never forget your most precious possession, your soul, not in contest with anything.