Profiles in Catholicism

Prayers

A prayer for women athletes

 “Women in Sport”

Dear Mary, you were a child once,

maybe once running around and chasing other children and being chased,

perhaps playing tag and running in and out of the washing lines or up and down the hills.

Did you race down, and tumble down, running and rolling down, or race back up,

maybe not calling the loser a slug, but helping up who had fallen,

heading back home for lunch, a clean-up and a rest too?

and yet there are those who love like you, your Son,

who were full of the zipping zest for sport.

Did these zealous women, train harder, faster

and higher, competing all the while to win medals of a glittering,

temporary kind, and maybe they thought of St. Paul racing for an everlasting reward?

Dear Mary, you know how fashions have changed,

once women were covered in cumbersome garments but now, the other extreme,

pray for a step-back from barely enough to suitably modest clothing.

Did the media pick out the fastest, most graceful, delightful of faces,

noting how the second helped the lead who collapsed to cross the line,

leaving behind a ruthless win and winning in her humanity?

Dear Mary, women are not a race behind but leading the course,

some live the active life to the full, singing and dancing, tennis and horse riding,

yielding only to death after entering religious life.

Did women believe the lie that there is no nobility and purpose in motherhood,

so their hearts shrink while their influence seems to resound around the world,

glamorizing singleness, only to regret all? 

Dear Mary, did your family watch you play and then,

calling you in, send you on an errand to the elderly, the housebound,

those in need, and were you happy in these visits and on these missions to others?

Did you feel cheated of your childhood, visiting here and there,

or are you shockingly happy to be sung through time, rejoicing in your

Son’s love, calling you out of total obscurity to light a way to Him?

Dear Mary, pray for the call to be like you, whether running on the field,

jumping the bars of achievements, raising the level of love’s

loving the gift of womanhood, or just being you, loving to love all.

Did it matter that no one recorded your fastest run, your highest jump,

your longest leap, as you outstripped us all in the race to pass through eternity’s opening,

as you ran home ahead of all mankind?

Dear Mary, turn our hearts and the hearts of all women,

to the irreplaceable gift that each one is given,

whether in the glory hall or the lowest place of all places where only the poorest are to be found.

by Francis Etheredge Catholic married layman, father of 11,

3 of whom are in heaven, and an author.

Just published: The Word in Your Heart: Mary, Youth, and Mental Health