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April 20, 2024The other day I re-watched the film When the Game Stands Tall, a film about De La Salle High School and the end of their football team’s 151-game winning streak. I remember when the streak ended because I was in high school playing football. At the start of my sophomore year, the principal gave a talk to my class about overcoming adversity. He said sometimes in life you do everything you are supposed to do and you still experience defeat. The two examples he gave were SJCI alumni Bryan Knight being cut by the Chicago Bears over the previous summer and De La Salle High School’s streak ending the previous week. As a fourteen-year-old kid (who, like many, knew everything ha!), I responded to the talk by rolling my eyes and turning to tell my friend, “This is the worst start-of-year pep talk I’ve ever heard.” As an adult, I now realize that this wasn’t a pep talk so much as it was a speech designed to prepare us for some of the hardships we would face in high school.
We are taught to believe that if we work hard enough, we will succeed. To borrow a line from Hulk Hogan, “Train, say your prayers, eat your vitamins. Be true to yourself. Be true to your country. Be a real American.” Yet, as we get older, we come to terms with the truth that life isn’t always fair; sometimes you lose through no fault of your own; and (to put it bluntly), we are not perfect.
In our faith lives, we are familiar with failure because we are familiar with sin. It can be very difficult for us, when we believe we are doing everything right, to stumble on our journey (we get that voice in our heads, “if only I were stronger, I did more, I had more will power”). This can lead us down a bad road because if we reread that last line, we become so focused on what “I” am doing that we forget to allow God to work through us. When we fall, rather than talking negatively about ourselves, we have an opportunity to reevaluate how we have been responding to temptation in our lives, and also we can think of the progress we have made in overcoming that habitual sin. The film When the Game Stands Tall depicts the players on the De La Salle football team before the streak ended as being too concerned with individual performance over team performance, too concerned with winning (at the expense of personal growth), and having simply lost their way.
We all fall down, but these falls shouldn’t defeat us, instead they ought to inspire within us a little humility, and remind us that God’s love is not something we earn, but is a gift that we respond to both in word and in deed as we all continue our journey together.
In Christ,
Fr. Chris
