´óÏó´«Ã½

From Father Christopher Jamison, Benedictine Monk:

Ìý

Of all the many accomplishments of the Rio Games, I believe the most extraordinary individual achievement of all is the record of the American swimmer, Michael Phelps. He won 5 Golds in Rio, making him the most decorated Olympian of all time with a lifetime total of 23 Olympic medals. Those who remember London 2012, however, will have been surprised to see him even competing in Rio. By the end of the London Games he had already achieved unheard of success; but he’d had enough of the intense discipline of world class sport. So in 2012, he hung up his trunks and started to enjoy a more relaxed lifestyle. But he soon took to excessive drinking and gambling, finally charged with drink driving after a night in a casino. Michael’s friends persuaded him to enter rehab and while there he realised that he’d never really had a purpose in life beyond success in sport. So when the sport stopped his life’s purpose stopped. During rehab, he began to believe that his life, like every life, had a purpose, namely to serve God and our neighbour. A simple truth but one that transformed his life. He married his partner and they had a child. Michael started training again and said he’d leave retirement to swim at the Rio Games. Now he swam as a service to his God and his family. His new Olympic success was different way to his previous achievements. He had found continuity between his work as a swimmer and the rest of his life. It took Michael Phelps 23 Olympic medals to discover what he believed to be the right kind of success, a success set within a wider purpose. I pray that all of us – with or without a faith - can discover an integrated, purposeful life a little more easily