The Paralympic Games must change the way we think about abortion

The Paralympic Games must change the way we think about abortion.

... if, as Lord Coe says, 'we will never think of disability the same way', surely we must lift 'the cloud of limitation' on the thousands of unborn babies in the womb, whom providence has seen fit to gift with one leg, no arms, no eyes, dwarfism or spina bifida.

 'Paralympics call Britain to review abortion laws'

“What is astounding is that Britain is enabling the eyes of the world to be opened to the giftedness and potential of those with disabilities through its hosting of the Paralympic Games. However, its own laws vehemently and shockingly discriminate against any new life in the womb that might possibly be affected by a physical handicap, genetic problems or a mental defect."

In conversations with a number of Paralympians in recent days [James Parker, Catholic co-ordinator for the 2012 Games] was astonished to discover that “many of them don’t even realise that, should their team mates have been conceived in Britain today, they would most likely be aborted. If Britain wishes to retain its place towards the head of the medals table at future Paralympic Games in decades to come then it needs to seriously consider changing its laws to stop discriminating against what is presently termed as an ‘unacceptable quality of life’. Games aside, any society that wishes to be healthy needs to increasingly value disability and non-disability equally.

h/t Archbishop Cranmer and Independent Catholic News

At the paralympics

At the end of July, I posted about having seen some Olympic and Paralympic tickets. As events turned out, I was able to use one of them yesterday to attend Day 2 of the Paralympics. I went with my sister and five of her children (child 6 was at the Excel with friend for the day, watching Judo).

It was cool to start with - fleeces and coats - but warmed up during the day. The tickets enabled us to see the first two games of the blind 5-a-side football, and then acted as a day pass to other events for the rest of the day. After lunch at the "American Church" (= McDonalds) we used them to watch some wheel chair basketball. By lunch time, the Olympic Park was busy - very busy - with all ages, but a noticeable presence of families.

 It was very moving to see such a huge response to disabled sport. As one commentator I heard said on the radio a day or two before the paralympics started, you very quickly started watching the sport precisely as sport, rather than as it being a disabled form of the sport. That the athletics stadium was full to capacity for an evening session on Day 2 also sent a very moving message.


The 5-a-side court during a warm up. Here, silence during play was of the essence, since the unsighted outfield players depend on shouted instructions from a sighted goalkeeper and attack guide, and on hearing the rattle in the ball.

 

The basket ball arena during women's wheel chair basketball. Here, the opposite was true, with noise being of the essence. The game we saw did not involve Team GB, but every time the announcer asked who was cheering for Germany or who was cheering for the USA, the whole arena roared equally for both sides.

 

 

A view of the Live at the Park mid-afternoon - the top of the large screen is just visible above the line of trees at the centre of this photograph. You can see a full bank of people watching the screen from the opposite side of the river, but cannot see the crowd on the nearside bank, behind the trees at the left also watching from the other side. The athletics stadium and orbit visible in the background

 

 

 

 

In both the arenas we visited, announcers were very good at explaining some of the specific aspects and rules of the sport. This was particularly true of the 5-a-side football, where the idea of "Let them hear, hold your cheer" was quite important. And in the basketball arena, there was non-stop entertainment by way of little games with audience members during breaks in play.

 

 

I did read rather quickly and in passing some comment in the print media to the effect that we should not take the disabled athletes as having an experience typical of disabled people, the athletes being people of exceptional commitment and ability, and perhaps having had access to exceptional opportunities. But what struck me from listening to Stacy James on Radio 2, and again yesterday, was that hope is not one sided. Hope is engendered, not by the disabled person alone and not by the able bodied person alone. It is engendered between the two together. Well over one hundred thousand people enjoyed a brilliant day out yesterday, a gift to them from the disabled athletes involved; but it must have been quite something for disabled athletes to compete before such large crowds yesterday.

 

There are many other people whose disabilities (or illnesses) mean that participation in sport is not a possibility for them. But why cannot they take the model of hope offered by the paralympic athletes and the crowds supporting them as a model for themselves, and seek to build the hope between and among themselves that was demonstrated so amply yesterday? And should not society as a whole recognise its responsibility to adopt attitudes of hope towards and alongside those suffering from illness and incapacity and to reject once and for all the language of a "life not worth living"? Most of yesterday's athletes will have had not the slightest inkling of the extent to which they offered a gift to individuals who they will never know and never meet.



Paralympics Chaplain on Radio 2

It still being the school holidays, I was listening to the Chris Evans Breakfast show on BBC Radio 2 this morning. At about 9.15 am, the programme includes a "Pause for Thought". At the time of the main Olympic Games, I observed that these slots had been given by chaplains accompanying Olympic athletes to the Games.

This morning, "Pause for Thought" was given by a London 2012 volunteer Paralympic chaplain, Stacy James. The full text is on the programme website here (you will need to scroll down) and below (as I expect that the text will not stay on the site.)  Do listen rather than read - go to the i-player here, find the programme for 29th August and move to 2:54:00 to catch Chris's introduction of Stacy and the brief, but very moving exchange at the end. I expect that it will only be available to listen for the next 7 days.

Helen (my mom) was uneasy all day. “Something’s wrong,” she said at dinner. When she got home at 8:30 pm, the phone rang. It was my college roommate. “Helen, Stacy was in a diving accident. She broke her neck.”

She arrived in the ER , I had tubes down my nose and throat, paralyzed from the neck down. She looked down at me, and all I could say was, “I’m sorry mom, please don’t be mad.”

“I’m not mad at you, honey; we’ll get through this,” she said, touching my face.

I spent the night in the ICU; my mom spent the night outside my door. The next day the doctors told my mom I would never walk again. She never told me.

“Imagine yourself running along the beach,” she said, sticking with me for a month in the hospital and three months in rehab. She learned to give me shots, medicine, and stretch my legs. She helped me re-enroll in college and accompanied me to class, taking notes, because my fingers were still paralyzed, and typed my papers at work. Two years later, I walked on crutches to graduate, my mom by my side. “We both shared a faith in God and, as time went by, in the belief that I would find a way to live a full life, a good life, a life full of purpose…”

In 1999, my mom walked with me as I wheeled to complete the New York City Marathon in 11 ½ hours. Today I am grateful to be a wheelchair athlete, Ms. Wheelchair Ohio 2002, a motivational speaker and an author. In 2004, I was accepted to be a volunteer chaplain for the Paralympics. Over the years, this role has taken us to Greece, Italy, and Canada, and we’ve looked forward to London. For every dream, I could count on my mom to be cheering. She never let my broken neck break my spirit.

As Stacy finished:

Chris Evans: Thank you so much. What a lovely testament to your mum.

Stacy: Oh, she's, she's wonderful, the greatest gift to me that God could have given.

Chris Evans: And you to her.

Stacy (rather hesitantly, if you listen): Oh, thanks.

Olympics Week Two: Religion

Part way through last week, Zero sent me a text pointing out that television coverage showed a number of the athletes taking part in the London Olympics making the sign of the cross before taking part in their events, and then praying again at the (successful) end of their event. At the time I responded cautiously (see below), but it is certainly worth reflecting just how much of a presence religion, and in particular manifestations of Christian belief, has had at the Olympic Games. The Vatican News Service/Vatican Radio has picked up this aspect of the Olympic Games, and, rightly in my view, points out that it is a clear but unspoken feature of the Games.

I haven't been able to find out where it was in the Olympic Park, but there was a "Faith" centre - what in the past would have been called, and probably still is in most people's every day language, a chaplaincy centre. This was multi-faith in character, with the Catholic Church taking part. [UPDATE: but see the comments.] Reports indicate that Mass was celebrated there three times each day. A link from the official Olympic Games wesbite gave information about Churches and places of worship of all the major religions, with links to websites of those faith communities. I was able to listen to BBC Radio 2, with Chris Evans broadcasting from the Olympic on the mornings of the Olympic Games. At about 9.15 am on at least two mornings, the "Pause for Thought" spot in the programme was taken by chaplains accompanying Olympic teams from other countries. The Mass celebrated at Westminster Cathedral to mark the opening of the Games "was attended by almost a 1000 people from all over the world, including dignitaries such as the Ambassador of Paraguay, High Commissioner of Jamaica, High Commissioner of Trinidad, and international Chaplains to the Olympic Teams."

So perhaps the first message that a secularised British culture can learn from the Olympic Games - that is, from one of the most profound expressions of culture the world has to offer - is that, for many of its participants, religious faith has been a part and parcel of their way of taking part. For those athletes who made the sign of the cross before their events, that sign is much less exceptional for them than it has been for us who have seen it on television. Just as Edith Stein describes a point in her intellectual development where the encounter with fellow philosophers of stature who held religious beliefs prompted her to recognise that the field of religion was one worthy of phenomenological study; so perhaps expressions of British culture should now recognise that religion as a phenomenon is not something that can be excluded from public life and culture.

The second thought is that the engagement of the Catholic Church in outreach activity around the Olympic Games has proven to be a very prescient contribution to the religious culture of the Games. Three Catholic parishes in East London, for example, have between them maintained continuous Eucharistic adoration for the duration of most of the Games. The Sion Community have animated the Joshua Camp, an evangelisation project involving outreach in locations near to the Games (and at St Patrick's Soho Square, for their Nightfever). Details of these activities are at the Brentwood Diocese website.

Cranmer led the way in commenting on the manner of the BBC's coverage of Usain Bolt's Christian faith - they ignored it - and Fr Tim has picked up the confusion caused to commentators by Meseret Defar's act of witness. I am struck though by the difference between these two examples. The first is a "celebrity", a sporting "super star" (and see my observations on this here). Meseret Defar is an unknown (or at least she was). The content of the first act of witness was somewhat generic. By displaying an image of the Mother and Son, Meseret Defar bore witness to an explicit content of her Orthodox faith, an image that in itself is profoundly evangelising. Meseret Defar has also shown not inconsiderable skill in the use of the media - her image of the Mother and Son has gone round the world, just as much as has her own picture. Is it those atheletes who are not celebrities who have really given the most effective witness to their Christian faith at the Olympics?

Which brings me back to the caution that I expressed in response to Zero's text half way through the week. Undoubtedly, sporting ability, as with any other talent (to use the Biblical word), is something that is received as a gift from God that can be used to his greater glory. An athelete can rightly give thanks to God for success in this field, and in public not only in private. But is it always going to be the case that a particular instance of sporting success (or any other success) represents the will of God? This requires a certain discernment, rather than a presumption, on the part of the athlete concerned. My caution was with regard to those whose Christian belief is of a non-ecclesial nature, where the idea of discernment can lack an objective character and where there can be a mis-placed presentation of success in the world as a sign of God's blessing.

All of which brings us back to the importance of the engagement of the Catholic Church at events such as the Olympics ...

[UPDATE: I did not see the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games, or listen to it on the radio. The pre-publicity suggested to me that it wasn't going to be worth the candle (ie the late night). Zero's view of the music was the same as the one I had formed from the pre-publicity - rubbish. Humblepiety's post The Olympics: A Tale of Two Ceremonies offers an interesting critique of the closing ceremony, particularly in the light of the opening ceremony. It takes up in part the themes of my post above, and I endorse particularly its view of songs such as "Always look on the bright side of life" and "Imagine".]

Olympics Week Two: Respect

"Respect" - a word that can mean some rather different things depending on the context and the place in which it is used.

In the street language (not intended in a negative or derogatory sense) of cities characterised by the presence of differing cultures, its use has a fundamental and worrying ambiguity. It can be used as a greeting between friends - "Respect" - and has an interesting parallel among some Asian young people of everyone in the group shaking hands with each other when they meet or separate, or a new arrival making a point of shaking hands with everyone as they arrive. It's use can represent a genuine courtesy. Or it can represent the intimidation and threat of a gang member who demands "Respect" - that is, fear and obeisance.

It has also become a strap-line with a variety of meanings in the realm of general politics (think George Galloway) and the politics of anti-racism, and for social organising in response to various forms of discrimination. The English Football Association has used "Respect" as the title of a programme aimed at improving the experience of everyone involved in football at every level.

During the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the President of the International Olympic Committee said to the athletes about to compete in the Games (my emphasis added):

Now you have a chance to become true Olympians. That honour is determined not by whether you win but by how you compete. Character counts far more than medals. Reject doping. Respect your opponent.

Jacques Rogge here used the word "respect" in its original meaning, asking the athletes to treat their fellow competitors with the proper regard due to them as persons and as fellow participants in a grand enterprise for which they have all prepared at some effort, a regard that represents a profound equality between the multiple gold medal winner and the athlete who comes last in the qualifying round of their only Olympic event.

From listening to media coverage during this week, it appears that some events have their own unwritten courtesies, their own ways of showing respect for other competitors. So the winner of the heptathalon event is, by custom and practice, accompanied by the other competitors for the lap of honour round the stadium. In rowing, the medals were presented on a pontoon without a podium, with all three medal winning crews on the same level. In part this has a practical aspect (three crews of eight would fall off a traditional podium) but, according to the coverage I heard, it is also intended as a sign of respect for the non-winning crews. I am sure that there are other examples like this tucked away among the many sports represented in the Olympic Games.

But what about the behaviour of the super stars of the Games? Do their trade mark performances before and after their events really show proper respect for their fellow competitors? Kris Akabusi has written something along these lines: Akabusi: Bolt gives to athletics, but also takes away. Usain Bolt might be the most obvious example, but in the "celebrity games" there are others who have gone into events with a presumption of success that has not always materialised. The news media certainly have had a part to play in this, but one cannot therefore take away from the athletes themselves their share of the responsibility. And, after an event, what is the point at which a rightful celebration of success becomes an arrogance towards fellow competitors?

Returning to Jacques Rogge's use of the word "respect". Exactly what is the shade of meaning that we believe athletes should give to that word in terms of the way in which they compete and behave?

Kris Akabusi suggests Kirani James as a counter example to Usain Bolt:

Just look at Kirani James, the Olympic 400 metres champion and Grenada's first ever medallist. He embodies the Olympic spirit: what a great example he is setting for youngsters all over the world. After he won the final, he went and shook the hand of every single competitor. When he beat Oscar Pistorius in the semi-final, he even went over to trade his number with the South African as James was so humbled to have competed against a man who has overcome so much just to be able to run in these Games.

And I am sure that there have been other examples of this style of respect for fellow competitors during the course of the Games.

[UPDATE: This story, too, demonstrates a form of respect for an opponent that deserves to be better known: A moment of Olympic glory that could never be caught on camera.]

Role Models

It is possible to watch the whole of the Opening Ceremony of the London Olympic Games here. I was only wanting to check out the short speech by Mr Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committtee, towards the end of the ceremony.... but found myself watching rather more than just that. What I think impressed me most in the "Pandemonium" sequence was representation of the pouring of molten steel and forging of an olympic ring, which I thought was done quite brilliantly, the whole sequence really looking like what would have happened in a steel works.

The following is my own transcript of some of the words of Mr Rogge. You can find his full words in the video link above. Addressing the atheletes about to take part in the Games, Mr Rogge said:

Your talent, your dedication and your commitment have brought you here. Now you have a chance to become true Olympians. That honour is determined not by whether you win but by how you compete. Character counts far more than medals. Reject doping. Respect your opponent. Remember that you are all role models. If you do that you will inspire a generation.

In referring to the athletes as role models, the President of the Olympic Committee in all probability wished to refer to them as being models for others who may take up sport inspired by them. But, as in other spheres of public life, being a role model extends to life as a whole and is not limited to just the athletes' participation in sport. Mr Rogge's reference to "character" hints at this wider implication of being a role model.

I found the willingness of the President of the Olympic Committee to refer to the athletes taking part in the Olympic Games as "role models" very interesting, and worth some reflection as far as its wider implications are concerned.

And particularly in the light of this type of reporting, which gives a certain impression of life in the Olympic village, an impression which may or may not be true. Towards the end of that Guardian article, one Ryan Lochte, a repeat visitor to the medal podium in the aquatic centre at the London games, is quoted as saying:

"My last Olympics, I had a girlfriend - big mistake. Now I'm single, so London should be really good".

I suspect that this is not quite the role-modelling that Mr Rogge had in mind!

Someone who has made a good impression on me has been Hope Powell, the coach of the Team GB women's football team. The way in which she conducted herself on the touchline during the game against Brazil at Wembley set an example that some premiership managers would do well to learn from. The glimpses of her in the video at the top if this report are enough to indicate what I am referring to.

[As a PS: I was very interested, too, in the willingness to include "Abide with me" in the Opening Ceremony. It's presentation by Emeli Sande and contemporary dance made sure that it came across in a very positive manner. Emeli Sande and Akram Khan, the dancer and choreographer, describe the experience in a report in the London Evening Standard.]

Tickets (with apologies to 1 John)

That of which we have heard, we have now seen with our eyes, we have looked upon and touched with our hands .... they have been made manifest, and we saw them and we testify to them, and proclaim that they have life (though perhaps not eternal) .... that which we have seen and heard we now proclaim also to you that you might have fellowship with us ...

Olympic and Paralympic tickets. Not mine, I hasten to add, someone else's, and I saw and touched and photograhed them yesterday. I was child-sitting while Mum plus one went in to Stratford to queue for an hour or so to collect some of these tickets. No time to post the photograph at the moment, but might do at some point.

Olympic Village a hive of debauchery? (at least according to the Guardian)

If a double page spread in today's Guardian (G2 section) entitled "Party hard and do some groping", and bordered at the top and bottom by sets of coloured condoms arranged to look like sets of Olympic rings, is anything to go by ......
.... then the strap line of the Day for Life being marked by the Catholic Church over the opening weekend of the London Olympics might just have something to say to the zeitgeist:

Use your body for the glory of God (1 Cor 6:20)

The Guardian have not got the article on their website - they have edited it from another on-line source, who have it, so far as I can tell, behind a pay wall. A flavour:

It's clear that, summer or winter, the games continue long after the medal ceremony."There's a lot of sex going on," says women's football goalkeeper Hope Solo, an American gold medallist in Beijing in 2008. "I'd say its 70% to 75% of Olympians," agrees US world-record-holding swimmer Ryan Lochte, who will be in London for his third Games....Some (athletes) swear off sex until their events are done; others make it part of their pre-event routine.

The Guardian article suggests that it takes an order for 100 000 condoms by the Games organisers to meet the expected demand. It rather reminds me of the story I heard once of a Personal Development Curriculum (PDC) department in a school rather apologetically alerting their colleagues in other departments that they were going to be doing sex education with the pupils that week and that, if any condoms turned up inappropriately in lessons or around the school, could their colleagues please take them off the pupils and return them to the PDC department. I wonder whether the Olympic athletes will, in reality, have much the same sense of things to do with condoms as these pupils seem to have had .....

There is a temptation to list the names of the athletes who are quoted in the Guardian article, but it is not clear how far most of them actually participated in the fun and games they describe.  That many are Americans is because the original source article was written and published by an American on-line magazine. The Guardian article doesn't suggest any sense of shame on their part, but their reticence, or the reticence of the author of the article, does suggest some sense of a boundary being transgressed. And whilst the Guardian article appears to want to give one impression of what happens in the Olympic Village, I am quite sure that many of the athletes just have far more sense than to behave in the way being described. The Day for Life theme has a chance to affirm these athletes in resisting the pressure of the culture being created around the Village.

Olympic Torch Relay 2012: Barking and Dagenham

I think something of the atmosphere of the Olympic Torch Relay has communicated itself through the media coverage. This morning the Relay was at the end of my road so, after putting my lunch in the oven on a timer, off I went. It is/was definitetly a "not to miss". I walked to the northern end of Dagenham Heathway, past gathering crowds lining the road along which the Relay was to pass. There was a very real sense of people gathering from the neighbouring streets to watch the Torch go past their own patch.

We were blessed with beautiful weather (though a couple of policemen I spoke to were finding it too hot in all their equpiment and would have preferred it to be raining!) and it being a Sunday, so lots of people turned out. The length of the route meant, though, that the pavements were not over-crowded. I then walked back to the Civic Centre, and waited to watch the torch pass Becontree Heath leisure centre. It was fascinating to watch the crowds re-gather at this point some 60 minutes or so after the Torch first passed, on its way to the Dagenham Town Show (it did a short double-back on itself to head up Whalebone Lane South).

I understand that the route through the neighbouring borough of Havering was also well lined later in the day. By that time I was back home, taking my lunch out of the oven....

So far only photographs from the morning have been posted; I assume more will follow.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's death is reported in today's news media. The juxtaposition of this event with the opening of the Olympic Games in China on Friday invites comment. As with the memory of Solzhenitsyn, there seems to be a deliberately selective memory as far as China is concerned.

In my view, Sozhenitsyn is first of all a witness and a witness of towering stature. I do not think that any of his literature should be understood except alongside The Gulag Archipelago, a carefully documented and systematic history of the Soviet prison camp system. This book documents particular instances, all of them supplied to Solzhenitisyn by witnesses or participants - hundreds of them - who risked their lives to preserve the story of this terror. It also documents the experience of the camps - arrest, first cell, interrogation, transport from one camp to another, and so on. The book was written in secret, its manuscript pages hidden from the Soviet authorities, in times when samizdat was a word whose meaning was recognised in every day life in the Western world. How many of our young people now would know the meaning of this word? The brutality is in places quite raw, so much so that you have to remind yourself as you read it that it is the unadorned testimony of a witness or participant, provided to the author. And in other places - I have just re-read an account of the meeting of "The Scientific and Technical Society of Cell 75" - there is a witness to the survival of the human spirit in the most crushing of circumstances.

In this context, I recall reading One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich, which describes the experience of a day in the life of a prisoner in the Gulag, and consciously inserting into it the rawness of brutality with which I was familiar from The Gulag Archipelago but which is most meticulously but discretely described in the novel.

Those in our day who criticse religion for being the cause of wars would do well to be less selective in their memories - the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a witness to the horror created by a regime that rejected and persecuted religious belief, and it is a horror on a quite unimaginable scale.

And as we turn towards China to follow the Olympic Games in the coming weeks, we might also try to be less selective in our memories.

The "winter" olympics

This was the view from my bedroom window when I woke up this morning. The photograph has been strategically taken to miss out the gas storage that provides my normal sky line!

The Olympic torch is due to be carried through London today (I wonder whether anyone has done a risk assessment for running in snow holding a burning flame?). Anti-China protests are forecast, with recent events in Tibet as the main focus. There are, of course, many other human rights issues with regard to China - an enforced one-child policy, for example, and anti-Christian persecution.

As far as the 2012 Olympics in London is concerned, I am not an enthusiast. The headline is one of increasing costs, but this has a translation on the ground for ordinary Londoners. I can see the Olympic project being a bit like a black hole, absorbing all the resources, human and material, that are in any way within reach of its boundaries. Those are then resources that are not available for many other projects in the area. Local Authorities like my own have projects for the upgrading of their social housing ("Decent Homes", for those in the know) and most are also involved in developing major building projects for their schools due to be implemented in the years approaching 2012 ("Building Schools for the Future"). I am not able to see how these cannot be adversely affected by a mega-building project at their front door.