Citations

March 18, 2024

The birthday album glowed with photos of me with friends from the Crossfit group, which uses the tongue-in-cheek name, “Beast Mode.” It offers poignant shots of the group posed at holiday gatherings and other special moments, all of us smiling. It includes a few of me attempting to exercise, no smile in sight.

It features some family photos, Sandy and me, and of grandsons Noah and Patrick. The album includes a couple of nice shots of me with a friend, the album’s developer, a creative young woman, Elise, after some running or exercise event. The photos show her brilliant smile, me with a dazed expression, trying to hold back exhaustion. 

She built the album around an Old Testament verse: “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” (Isaiah 40:31). The accompanying page features a panoramic photo of Alaska’s snow-covered Mount Denali towering over surrounding forest.

I looked again through the collection of photos. I reread the citation. I don’t recall, after the Beast Mode workouts, ever “soaring on wings like eagles.” I definitely do feel weary and faint, which is putting it mildly. I’m usually slumped on a bench catching my breath.

How is this passage, eloquent and consoling, relevant to the BM team’s demanding routines of heaving barbells, stroking on rowing machines, climbing rope, jumping on boxes—and pullups, pushups, situps, sprints, wall walking?  

We all know exercise is better for you than sprawling on a sofa wielding the remote or tapping on your cellphone. And for those present in the Beast Mode gym, the endorphin addiction has taken hold to one degree or another: if its hurts, it will feel good later. You stagger out of the gym, get a shower and a good meal, and you recover, more or less. You feel better.

“Staying active” is the first rule in the senior citizen’s health-care manual. Most YMCAs offer “Silver Sneakers” or other exercise classes for oldsters. The nation is enduring a pickleball craze. Who plays? Mostly old people. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” my oncologist says.

Elise, in assembling the album, examined probably dozens of photos, I didn’t ask. She couldn’t help noticing that while working out and afterward I’m panting and cross-eyed, and never wearing a sunny, cheerful smile. Yet I was present. I was at Beast Mode. I was a witness to the mystery. I could have chosen instead to stroll on a treadmill wearing earbuds, zoned out on pop-40 music.

The mystery really is nothing less than discovering the secret of life. But we seldom stop to make the connection between confronting challenge, hardship, pain, and understanding our place in the world, which we know is filled with challenge, hardship, pain. Even if not grasping the mystery fully, we have at least a sense of what it means.  

Elise understands the purpose of all that pain. She, like the others, accepts it, learns from it, and uses it to push forward with life. We discover that hardship and pain steels us. The challenge of Beast Mode only begins in the gym. The acceptance of it, the summoning of the fortitude to persevere, begins in the heart.

The Isaiah passage, line 31, is the last line of the chapter. Earlier, line 28: “… The Lord is the eternal God, creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint and grow weary … he gives strength to the fainting, for the weak he makes vigor abound.”

Elise created a theme. She includes, next to a photo of me on a forest trail, a sentence the Oxford and Cambridge scholar C.S. Lewis wrote in a letter to an American poet, Mary Willis Sherburne, who he never met, in June 1963: “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” The line is in one of the last of more than 100 letters Lewis wrote to Sherburne, beginning in 1950.

The album is a gift to me, but it offers a message that rises beyond the smiling faces of people going through exercises that summon for me nervous memories of Marine Corps training. The message is offered in the photos, the words of Isaiah, the words of Lewis: a message of faith that carries us forward, beyond the busyness of careers and family, where most of the Beast Mode team are, to the twilight of life.

So we stumble out of the gym at the end of each session, gasping for breath, some of us asking what in heck is this all about, why are we doing this. Then we go on.

C.S. Lewis died just five months after he wrote that line to Sherburne. And so we go on, moving forward in the faith to which Elise is leading us as she reveals, in her photo selection and arrangement, the truth found in Isaiah and Lewis. We face challenges, hardship, pain. Only then, understanding.