Hall

When Usain Bolt makes that creative gesture after a significant victory, I have never seen it reported that as well he said 'to the world'. From my distance, I have never seen his lips move. But a clergyman in your paper asserts that Bolt utters as well, the words 'to the world'.

From that suspect foundation Canon Ernle P. Gordon proceeds to say that Bolt's gesture is a demonstration "that the talented Jamaican athletes are called to be co-creators with God". But isn't that true of all humanity? In fact, I would go further and declare that for every birth, legitimate or illegitimate, in Jamaica or anywhere else in the world, the male and female union was an act of co-creating with God.

Spirituality and meditation

Canon Gordon said he was impressed by the way "Jamaican athletes were comfortable with their spirituality and publicly sought to meditate before entering a race". He might be right, but he might also be terribly wrong to equate spirituality with meditation. In Hinduism, meditation is important, but it is meditation to achieve the ability to think about nothing - Nirvana.

Yet, Canon Gordon sees in the 'meditation' of Bolt and other Jamaican athletes enough to commend them for being 'missionaries in Berlin'. Ambassadors I can understand more readily.

Further, in drawing Augustine of Hippo into his theologising, he says, "Humanity is not always sinful, but is capable of divine manifestations and exceptional talent." Surely he has done injustice to Augustine of Hippo, North Africa, and the first black man to achieve such high Church status. Augustine nowhere says that human beings always sin, for if so they would be incapable or performing the saving act of putting faith in Christ for salvation.

But Augustine did say that human beings are fallen creatures, sinful in nature and the headlines of newspapers and the screens of TV prove Augustine right every day.

In my understanding of biblical theology, it does not come like a bolt from the blue, but is grounded in biblical truth, historically recorded, spiritually experienced, divinely declared and logically tested. Otherwise, it is mistaken mythology.

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