Article
Comment
Sport
5 min read

What’s Simone Biles doing today?

How to live with winning and losing.

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate. 

A gold medallist bites her medal.
Simone's gold medal moment.
@simonebiles

I wonder about what Simone Biles is doing today. She is one of the many athletes whose Paris 2024 was about more than gold; it was about redemption. Now the Games are over, what happens to their restoration story?  

The narrative about redemption seemed to dominate the headlines and linger in post-event interviews. Some Olympians came to the Games seeking it. Gymnast Rhys McClenaghan was tipped for gold in Tokyo 2020 but stumbled on the pommel horse, finishing in seventh place. In France, he climbed to the top of the podium.  

Others completed a fall and rise within the two weeks themselves. Sprinter Jeremiah Azu had a faltering beginning to the Games, disqualified for a false start in the individual 100m heat. Just six days later he was clutching a bronze medal for the relay.  

Then there are those like taekwondo athlete, Jade Jones, who also laboured for years and gave their all – but didn’t get the payoff that they sought. What does the story mean when it is unfulfilled? And when the Games are over, how do people live with winning and losing?  

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up. 

After years of professional procrastination, a few months ago I finally took the plunge and joined LinkedIn. An impressive feat, I know. It was driven by practicality; I was finishing a job as a climate policy advocate and making the leap into consultancy. But I’ve been fascinated to discover how people in my community, and millions of others, are sharing tender and vulnerable ideas and thoughts in this social workspace. They are coming with questions – what does success look like? How are you navigating your purpose in the day to day? What world do you want your children to inherit? – and gentle ideas about their answers.  

People are asking about and reflecting on how to navigate winning, and losing, and living in the murky space in between.  

This feels striking because one of the other prevalent stories many of us believe, maybe unconsciously, is that life will generally be good and any setbacks are the exception. Growing up in the Nineties the message seemed to be: the world is your oyster if you work for it. Put in the effort, and the losses will be few and the trajectory will be up.  

But the last few years in particular – economic volatility, growing exposure of deep inequalities, the worsening climate crisis – hammer home that this is not reliably the case. No matter how much effort you put in, we rarely live through one type of season at a time. Joy and suffering co-exist. And amongst the highs and the lows, there is a whole lot of everyday living. Show up at the desk, the school gate, the supermarket.   

Into our messy, maybe frightening, sometimes ordinary, lives, we love a redemption story to brighten and neaten things up.  

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. 

But part of the problem with many of the redemption tales we share is that they rely on the person themselves to deliver their own restoration. They’ve had (and are perhaps blamed for) a fall from grace, and now it’s up to them to find it within themselves – their physical, mental and emotional capacity – to achieve restoration. That’s a heavy weight to put on anyone’s shoulders (however broad they may be).  

And any redemption gained is fleeting. Medal winners talk about ‘gold medal syndrome’: the post-competition feeling of depression, loneliness and emptiness. For those athletes who’ve now headed home after fulfilling a salvation arc, is the emotional dip going to be even steeper, harder?  

Most of us won’t be Olympians, despite how expertly we discuss the diving scores every four years, but that sense of deflation after achieving a long-sought goal can be resonant. We’ve strived and risked ourselves for something, only to find the aftertaste is a bit flat. That new job is good but flawed. Winning that award doesn’t stop a rejection landing in the inbox the next day. The house renovations are already showing cracks. Winning and losing are both transient. A redemption made ourselves rarely satisfies or lasts. 

The sting of winning or losing is softened when we stop ascribing all meaning to them, and instead cast them in the context of a wider story. One that goes further than a single person or moment – a birth, a podium, a bonus. Such a story can speak beyond our own lives to the core challenges we face in the world: fairness into a broken economic system; peace instead of violence in our communities; flourishing, not escalating environmental crises.   

During my years of climate advocacy, I have sometimes envied colleagues working on more tightly defined topics with the possibility (only fulfilled through huge amounts of wisdom and graft, of course) of winning. Change a law, solve a problem. As the climate gets warmer and more unpredictable, it’s easy to have a sense that, at best, you are just making things a little less bad. The wins are in the context of a lot of disappointments, and a whole lot more grey space in between. 

But by being able to root my day to day in a bigger story, I can move forward with hope. Understanding our lives as part of an even greater narrative – the story of this world that God loves and sustains and restores – saves us from the pressure and heartache of trying to redeem our own lives. Instead, we can live them – the wins, the losses, and all the mundane moments in between – in light of that bigger story.  

Looking at the world through the lens of God’s redemption story helps us to stay clear-sighted: celebrating the successes and not make them our whole world; naming the problems and still acting with hope and grit. 

A redemption arc is a beautiful one. I want to hold onto that longing, but find it in a story that’s deeper, longer and richer than I can see. A story that lasts.  

Article
America
Church and state
Comment
Idolatry
Politics
4 min read

Trump's triumph is not the end of the world, nor the dawn of a new age

Donald Trump may not be as bad as many fear and not as good as many hope

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Silhoutted by a sun rise, a helicopter flies over The White House
Marine One Flying over The White House, Inauguration Day, 2017.
Anthony Quintano, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Reading reactions to Donald Trump's election win across different news outlets over the last couple of days has been an education in the contemporary political landscape.  

For left-leaning media the future is dark. An Atlantic opinion piece laments that “we must learn to live in an America where an overwhelming number of our fellow citizens have chosen a president who holds the most fundamental values and traditions of our democracy, our Constitution, even our military in contempt.” The Guardian called it “an extraordinary, devastating moment in the history of the United States.” It is a secular version of the sermon: “The End Is Nigh”. 

Yet turn to the Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, or anything on the right, and you find a mixture of gloating (“Trump’s triumph is a disaster for Starmer and the self-regarding, virtue-signalling elites!”) and optimism that a new day is dawning. Trump himself hailed the advent of a ‘golden age’ for the American people. Having been mired in misery since the Conservatives’ routing in the UK general election here is a welcome bit of good news for those on the right. 

On either side the apocalyptic note is hard to miss. A Telegraph writer says: “2024 is the real deal, a revolutionary moment, a reconstitution and realignment of American and Western politics around fresh principles.” A Guardian writer says that “there is nothing but bad news for Europe in Donald Trump’s US election victory. The only question is just how bad it will get.” 

Immediately after elections there’s always a bit of this apocalyptic tone. When Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party dismantled the ‘red wall’, winning traditionally secure Labour seats in 2019, the rhetoric was that this was a generational change, a fundamental re-alignment in UK politics to the right. Labour, surely, was finished. Five years later, after Keir Starmer’s landslide and the routing of the Tories, it all looks very different – at least here in the UK.  

Politicians always, in the long run, fail... The question is how badly they fail and whether they are able to do some good along the way until they do so. 

Tony Blair fell from grace due to misleading us all over the Iraq war. David Cameron fell because he lost a referendum over Brexit. Boris Johnson was ousted because he allowed parties in Downing Street while the rest of the country was locked down. George W. Bush pursued a disastrous campaign for regime change in the middle east. Barack Obama started with great hope, won a second term, but didn’t change gun laws and was widely thought to have weakened the US through a failed foreign policy. Joe Biden is thought to have failed because he let inflation grow rampant and allowed American borders become too porous.

Donald Trump will fail too. He may, as he promised, deliver an improved economy. He may stem illegal immigration. That, after all, is why many voted for him. But eventually he will disappoint. So would Kamala Harris if she had won. So will Keir Starmer. And that is not to criticise these particular leaders. Like football managers, they all get sacked in the end, and there are very few who like Sir Alex Ferguson, or Jed Bartlett, get to wave farewell to the crowds at the time of their own choosing. Even then, Fergie’s legacy was tainted by his inability to create a legacy, and Bartlett was, despite our misty-eyed nostalgia, a fictional President.  

It’s always tempting to reach for apocalyptic language at times like this. Yet the real meaning of ‘apocalypse’ is ‘revelation’, or ‘unveiling’. Taking the longer view, perhaps the real apocalyptic moment at times like these is the unveiling of the true place of politics – as important, but not ultimately important. These moments reveal the inadequacy of all human kingdoms, and our longing for a different kingdom, a kingdom of ‘righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ as the Bible has it, things that no government or election result can ever deliver.  

Politics matters because the way we live together matters. Yet what politics at its best can provide – a well-functioning economy, law and order, managing good international relations - only go so far in enabling a flourishing life. Like returning to a familiar drug that we think we can once and for all make us happy, despite the numerous times it has failed before, we still somehow believe that politics can solve all our problems. “Trump will fix it” said the banners – though in fact that is what every politician promises. Jesus warned: “Many will come in my name and say ‘I am he’, and lead many astray.”  

Most probably, Donald Trump will not be as bad as many fear, and not as good as many hope. Because politics is never the final word. As American theologian, Matthew Burdette put it recently: “The solution to our politics is not a political solution. Voting for the right or the wrong candidate will not change the situation: the devil is happily bipartisan, so long as politics is our idol. No, what is needed is fundamentally and thoroughly spiritual. Only when we can say with the prophet Isaiah that “the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as dust on the scales,” that is, only when we can see against the horizon of the ultimate how small are our worries, will these relative, penultimate things like politics be set right and take on their true meaning in our lives.”