the games and the bodies

The Olympics were fraught with controversy this year: despite China's promises to the IOC, we witnessed her continued violation of human rights, the country's world-threatening environmental degradation driven by their exploding economy, their manufacturing short-cuts motivated by greed that tainted and poisoned their products, their training (abuse?) of children to become champions... And yet.

In the midst of the Games, every evening I eagerly keep my date with the TV. It is the drama of the competition, yes, that is attractive, the lure of the chase. But I believe I would watch even if there were no medals. What draws me most is the magnificence of the athletes' bodies.

Every morning that we awake healthy and whole and able to tend to our daily tasks, we are witness to a miracle of life. Yet we hardly pay attention. We do not rise and offer a dance of joy, soaked with a sense of overwhelming gratitude. We do not stand in awe in front of the mirror and wonder at the miracle of the human eye or the dexterity of the only organ that is outside our bodies, or better, the boundary of our bodies, that keeps the right things in and the wrong things out and that bounds a entire universe inside of us.

Our bodies are so complicated, I am certain that we laymen only know a minor portion of what they do. Every now and then we hear of a disease that draws attention to a body function that we never knew about or never thought could misfire that way. The magnificent, interwoven complexity of our bodies goes unnoticed until something goes wrong.

But come the Olympics, and it is not loss or brokenness that brings us awareness of the majesty of the human body. Rather it is the awe of wholeness, sculpture and beauty. Finely worked (ignoring the abuses that may be heaped upon it for the purposes of the Games), the human body is stunning. The muscles flow, dive deep and reappear. The skin shines, the limbs move with an ease, power and speed the rest of us can only ache for.

I would imagine gym membership bumps up around the Olympics. Some of us are moved to cease taking our bodies for granted; no longer believe we can excuse our flabbiness or laziness.
We see what can happen, what is locked inside ourselves if we but tend to our health better.

And so it is with the world - how full and fruitful and ripe it can be if we treat it right. Nature can be magnificent, if we help it along in the right way. Environmentalism, like the Olympics, doesn't mean leaving nature alone. It means working with it to bring it to its optimal fullness, its most radiant health.

So, see you in the Senior Olympics in a couple of years?