marathon.docx

The reverberations of the terrible events at the finishing line of the Boston marathon will ring around the world and especially in this country until everyone is safely from home from the London marathon on Sunday. To run a marathon is a huge achievement, not one that everyone will choose, but a personal challenge, and an increasingly popular thing to do at least once in your life. Perhaps it is the quirky distance or the ancient name that gives marathon in recent years a deeper cultural meaning far beyond professional athletics. Running a marathon seems like a difficult challenge, but isn’t out of reach. So marathons running in the cities around the world are truly races of the people, races that level and bond the competitors who win just by finishing. It seems to me that marathons are often run for the similar reasons to the motivations behind making pilgrimages in more publicly religious times. Sometimes they are run to atone for something, to get pass or through tragedy, to affirm the memories of a loved one lives in the actions of those left behind. Today people run to support the research into cancer and Alzheimer, to raise money for children with limited life, or to celebrate a new start. It is doubly shocking then that into amid such a redemptive altruistic public event, the viciousness of bomb hidden in pressure cocoons came this week. In contrast with the strong personal relationships evident in running a marathon for someone else, sometimes with their faces printed on the T-shirt of the person running, in contrast to this, is the indiscriminate anonymity of terrorism. The terrorists can’t have any idea who it is they are killing by placing bombs on a tube train or in an office, in rubbish bins or in a rag sack. The ordinariness of the operator and location belies the unamendable grief it causes. The London marathon this week will have special points for those who take part and those who come to support them. There are talks of black armed bangs in Boston Yorkshire’s mourning tributes. After the 7.7 bombings in 2005, one week later at midday, people were urged to come out of their offices and places of work and stand on the streets in silence. Taxis and buses pulled over. Bells tolled. And the people of the city reclaimed the streets from those who made them too afraid to go out. Everyone will make their own decision about London, but clearly thousands will defy their anxiety, and will run publicly for the cause that they believe in. And in doing so they will affirm the world the anti-apartheid campaigner Archbishop Deathmantutu who in the midst of violence was resilient enough to say that goodness is stronger than evil. Love is stronger than hate.