Go Team!

Every day and all week-end long, all sorts of people are running back and forth on fields, trying to get a ball from one side of the field to the other! And in some cases, millions of other people gather to watch this spectacle.

When you stop to think about it, it is actually pretty amazing that we participate by active admiration and interest, in the striving and success of people we don’t even know and probably never will. Those who support the various teams pay a lot of money to watch them, and have nothing to gain from their winning. This is a rare thing: That millions of people are rejoicing in the accomplishments of others in a genuine way. We become “members” of one another. When the team we were rooting for wins, we say, “we won!” We are elated, but why?  What has actually been accomplished? What has the team done? Have they done any real “work?”

What remains in what they have done is the eternal part which is the invisible, individual development of character and will.

In our times, the work of the gods has been handed over to human beings. We are called to take up Olympic events of the soul; that we may raise ourselves to the higher part of our being, that we may challenge ourselves to become ever and ever more divine in our humanity.

Like any development it requires daily practice and attentiveness and will surely make us humble. It may seem, as we work on our spiritual life, like we are not “accomplishing” anything in the outer sense. But our striving is written into the world of spirit, and the rejoicing crowds who are cheering us on, are of a greater magnitude and number than we can ever imagine.

And we rejoice in the amazing striving of noble and admirable people because it reminds us of what is possible and encourages us to try harder and to be more courageous.

Thus the world will be transformed; in the deep and ever-increasing consciousness that we are “members of one another,”  working out the serious game of good against evil for the sake of the truly Good.

by Carol Kelly