Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord does not faint or grow weary . . . He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary . . Is. 40
Graduating from elementary school (grade 8) to first year high school was a major change for me. Instead of walking to school I had to take a bus (a bus and trolley car!) to reach LaSalle High School several miles from my home. I could have gone to North Catholic High (run by the diocese – and free!) a much shorter distance away. But I had by some miracle won a half scholarship to LaSalle – a private school run by the Christian Brothers and requiring tuition ($24 per month back in 1941). So I chose LaSalle, which had a kind of gothic style to its campus. Of course being taught by men instead of nuns was one of the major changes I looked forward to.
Soon I found they had intramural programs all year, in harmony with the sport of the season. Enjoying football and baseball as a boy, I stayed almost every day after school to roll in the mud or run the bases for my classroom’s honor. Not knowing much about track and field, I thought I would try that when the spring came round. So there we were, students from all classes, assembled at the football field around which ran a wide running track with several chalked guidelines. Time came for us freshmen to compete in the mile – a full mile distance reached by running four times around that track, i.e. the perimeter of the wide, 100 yard football field.
I lined up with maybe 25 other freshmen from my classroom and others. When the starting shot went off I took off with all the speed I could muster. After all, this was a race, wasn’t it? Before I had gone one quarter of the way around the track I found myself completely alone – well in the lead of all those slowpokes behind me who could only manage a jogging speed. So on I sped, amazed at myself, my hitherto unrealized capacity for speed. At this rate I would finish before my competitors reached the half-mile marker. That is, if my breath held out! For I was soon out of breath, running slack, staggering even before I had gone half way round the first circuit of the track – while those joggers behind me soon caught up and gracefully passed by – to be lost in the distance. And I? I gave up, I practically crawled to the grass border, so as not to be trampled to death, and lay there on my back, gasping, looking at the sky and acquiring wisdom. Namely: running the mile requires pacing oneself! My estimate of myself was reduced to a mere pedestrian. I had learned henceforth to give up track, to look for other ways to fame – indeed, if fame were to ever be my destiny. Which it hasn’t.
But a modicum of wisdom has. Sure, Jesus says in today’s Gospel: You are to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. But the English word perfect is misleading. In Greek Jesus says: Be fully developed, mature, wise up; be a finished product, a complete human being, well rounded by experience. Or as St. Luke’s Gospel puts this saying of Jesus: be compassionate even as your heavenly Father is compassionate.
As a freshman in high school I was nowhere near being mature, a complete [perfect?] human being well rounded by experience, compassionate toward that scrawny kid stupid enough to line up for a challenge he knew nothing about. Oh well, I guess it was compassionate to let him learn the hard way. I don’t run the mile anymore; never have.