This week we will be looking at two distinct worldviews and how they appeared in our culture recently. Today's comes from last week's Invictus Games, an Olympic-type event in which wounded soldiers met for competitive sports in Orlando, Florida. The Invictus Games are beyond inspiring and are a healthy kick in the backside for our world's complainers. Try telling these amazing men and women that you are too sick to go to school, or too tired to go to work, or that your life is hard or unfair. And in true English Champion fashion, the Games' motto comes from a piece of literature:
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
--British poet William Ernest Henley, 1875
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
--British poet William Ernest Henley, 1875