These Olympic athletes remind us who we are as a nation: diverse, resilient, fearless, imperfect, and defiantly joyful in the face of our demons and detractors.
Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
In the grand scheme of things, this is all pretty inconsequential.
With every horrible thing happening here at home, what a group of strangers does on a slab of ice or a frozen hillside a few thousand miles away doesn’t impact me in the slightest, I know that.
So, why the hell was I crying?
As I watched Alysa Liu, the child of a Chinese dissident, radiant and beaming as she made positively superhuman physical feats look simply effortless, I felt a lump growing in my throat, while tears pooled in my eyes.
Knowing the perilous and nearly impossible journey she’d taken to that moment: the expectations she’d obliterated, the rigid system she’d transcended, and the agency she’d reclaimed along the way, for four minutes the world stopped, and I was transfixed.
With each graceful flourish, with every blinding cyclone spin, and every explosive, shimmering smile, I found myself involuntarily feeling something largely foreign lately, something I haven’t felt often: I felt proud of my country.
Not the cheap patriotism that so many wear like an ill-fitting costume, not some ceremonial love for homeland that denies its flaws and failings, and certainly not the blind, cultic adoration that our President and his sycophantic disciples demand.
This was a pride in the people who call this place home and who wish to; the disparate humanity that is renovating our assailed and beleaguered nation in the small and close places.
Throughout these Olympics, I have been reminded that we are a land of stories.
Stories like Liu’s: a skating prodigy who grew so disheartened by an unforgiving, often dehumanizing system that she walked away at 16, having had her joy extinguished, her identity swallowed up.
Stories like Texas-born Amber Glenn, the oldest competing U.S. women’s singles skater in nearly a century and the team’s first openly LGBTQ member, who has battled crippling depression and an eating disorder on her way to Olympic glory.
Stories like Laila Edwards, whose brave, trailblazing journey led from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, to her becoming the first Black American woman to win a gold medal in women’s hockey.
Stories like American freeskier Hunter Hess, whose experience at the very pinnacle of his career, had to overcome a disgusting and dangerous personal attack by a sitting President and his mindless, knuckle-dragging acolytes, simply for expressing a love for country that refuses to co-sign the totality of its ugliness and brutality.
These aren’t just skaters and skiers; they are symbols. They do more than just represent us in a global athletic competition once every four years; they help us remember that we are a nation still becoming, still unfinished, still with chapters left to write, and that we are among their 342 million co-authors.
It’s easy to dismiss sports as trivial; a frivolous diversion providing temporary escape from the sprawling horrors of the day (though that in itself is no small achievement).
But these Olympic athletes remind us who we are as a nation: diverse, resilient, fearless, imperfect, and defiantly joyful in the face of our demons and detractors.
We relentlessly battle the monsters both around and within us.
We lift one another when our bodies fail, our spirits falter, and our dreams come undone.
We stridently defy those who would keep us trapped in the stunted smallness of prejudice and stereotype.
We give what we have in the moment, even if it is less than we wish it were, even if the possibility of victory seems remote.
We love our homeland fiercely but not blindly, so much so that we demand its better angels and will not abide its lesser devils.
We willingly sacrifice valuable things so that we might protect the priceless, those worth more than gold.
So, yeah, it’s just a bunch of strangers on a slab of ice and a frozen hillside, but it matters.
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
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