Jack Butler writes for National Review Online about the sad end of an athletic career.
The career of high-profile U.S. women’s soccer player Megan Rapinoe ended anticlimactically on Saturday night, as she was brought down by an Achilles injury six minutes into her final match. For her, the conclusion is obvious: There is no God. Per Fox News: …
… “I’m not a religious person or anything and if there was a god, like, this is proof that there isn’t,” Rapinoe said. “This is f—ed up. It’s just f—ed up. Six minutes in and I eat my Achilles.” …
… [I]t’s hard to tell if she is being facetious as a kind of coping mechanism, or being sincere. One hopes it is the former. Because the latter is a spiritually barren and personally decrepit way of looking at the world.
It’s a way I can at least comprehend, however. My own career as an athlete, such as it is, has been full of disappointments, setbacks, and even Rapinoesque freak injuries. … It’s especially raw when, after trying to subordinate so many variables to our personal control, we are waylaid by one we cannot. So I get this tendency.
Which is why I reject it. Rapinoe at least seems to be sincere when she claims not to be a believer. So she is probably unaware of the ancient conversations about theodicy: i.e., trying to explain why bad things happen. Many believers struggle with this as well but have enough faith in the workings of Providence to find meaning and purpose in even the most dire struggles and hardships. …
… Even putting theology aside, however, there’s nothing uplifting about this way of reacting to adversity. By imagining all the world as revolving around one person, it is selfish. By viewing reality through only one prism (competitive athletics), it is obsessive. And by limiting its time horizon to a single event, it is stunted. In dwelling on this concluding calamity, Rapinoe sidelines the entire rest of her career, one full of events she surely considers triumphs.
