That the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic games included John Lennon’s Imagine was no real surprise. There is nothing in the world capable of uniting humanity like sport and nowhere is that more evident than at an Olympic games where for a few brief days politics, religion, hatred, discrimination of any sort are put to one side. Sport only works because we agree to live (for a short-time) under a set of rules and values that all sides recognise and accept. It works because someone enforces those rules; if your foot steps out of your lane, or you start before the gun, then no matter how fast you run you are out of the race. Sport only brings us together because we agree to live under a greater authority, a benign dictatorship that ensures fairness and equality for all.
The Olympic ideal is a world where we live as one, atheletes share in eachothers joys and console each other in loss. They live as one community in a village that unites the world and so the world is as one and at peace.
But such an experience is meant to teach us something much more than the benefits of sport and something to which sport is only meant to point. CS Lewis wrote of how our experiences of life in this world are pointers to another world and a greater reality and he says we owe this too to the Greeks.
Symbolism comes to us from Greece. It makes its first effective appearance in European thought with the dialogues of Plato. The Sun is the copy of the Good. Time is the moving image of eternity. All visible things exist just in so far as they succeed in imitating the Forms.
Peter Kreeft say ‘If Plato is right, everything we see is a shadow, copy, image, imitation, or sign of something unseen.’ Essentially everything that we experience in this world is an expression for a better world.
Peter Kreeft, in his excellent book, The Philosophy of Tolkien quotes CS Lewis’s words at the end of The Last Battle ‘when the whole world of Narnia dies and is swallowed up into its Heavenly Platonic archetype.’
“Listen, Peter. When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. . . . And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.” His voice stirred enveryone like a trumpet as he spoke these words; but when he added under his breath “It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!” the older ones laughed.
It was the Unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling…”I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this.”
And so what exactly are you and I are meant to learn at the end of an Olympic fortnight? That all along was only a sign of something yet unseen and something that we remember from a world long ago. There is a world to come, a world we are waiting for and a world that we have been looking for all of our lives not just in a church but in an Opening ceremony, a marathon race, a diving competition, a 100 metres race run in 9.64 seconds. When through Christ we get there we like the Unicorn will say ‘I have come home at last!’