No Salvation Without the Cross
I was beginning to enjoy this running lark. Muggins, who never voluntarily sees 6.00 am is now regularly up, togged out in (don’t laugh), running kit and training at this ungodly hour, all part of a schedule for a charity half marathon run in October. The Seminary is quiet at that time; what, were we in Oxford would be called the “quad” is empty and ideal for a practice run. My regular progress in fitness was inviting an almost Palagian confidence in the possibilities of self-improvement. The fall was inevitable but unexpected.
On Tuesday I was ready for a relaxed 20 laps. All warmed up I begin. As usual I began the Rosary crossing the starting line. To those inclined to be impressed I must add a caveat. I count my laps in decades of the Rosary; one lap is enough to get through the prayers and give time for a short reflection at the end. Lap training is very boring and this keeps my mind in gear. At first I was mildly embarrassed to use the Rosary in this way. I say it fitfully at best, despite a theoretical appreciation of the prayer itself and no wish to exclude it from what might be called my prayer life. Over the months of training, I have begun to realize that it wasn’t just a lap counter but was prompting prayerful reflections different from those which I normally associate with my less active recitations of the familiar decades. My most, dare I say profound reflections, given their theme, are perhaps triggered by the aches and pains my poor out-of-shape body is experiencing from all this unfamiliar stressing. The decades which catch me most are the Birth and the Resurrection, with a respectful nod at the Assumption as well.
These days, pushing myself past unfamiliar milestones of endurance, I am all too aware of the limitations of the body, and marvel that God might voluntarily have assumed this condition. I am used to thinking of the Birth of Jesus as God present in the human simplicity of a baby and the pious stories of Mary’s painless delivery all suggest an almost heavenly carnality. Puffing my way round the “quad” I feel my own carnality in an all too earthbound way and when the third Joyful Mystery comes round I marvel, with new intensity, that Jesus could choose to take on such a limiting form.
The first Glorious Mystery provides a far more immediate hope than I normally associate with the theme. Instead of the rather theoretical sense of “life beyond the grave” that I usually link to this core doctrine, these mornings I feel a real delight in the certainty that there is a future for this frail body I am pushing round the track. I am comforted to know that it will find completeness in Paradise that it does not now have. I am not planning charity Marathon’s in the afterlife, but rather derive from these lap-counting reflections on the Resurrection a confidence that all this carnality has an ultimate purpose and will be transcended, not abandoned, come the day.
Coming out the 8th Hail Mary of the Presentation, I pulled a muscle and must rest for a week. This does not put paid to my (half) Marathon hopes, but it is a reminder, if ever I needed one that one cannot move effortlessly from a breathless reflection of the Joyful Mysteries to the sweaty meditation on the Glorious ones, without first going through a painful encounter Sorrow decades. Such are the thoughts of this long distance runner who had expected that Salvation was possible without the Cross; No longer!