Chariots of Fire
SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, a remarkable man did a remarkable
thing. Eric Liddell of Scotland refused to run a heat at the
1924 Olympic Games in Paris because the race was scheduled
on a Sunday, which his faith taught him would violate the
Sabbath.
As we know from the Academy Award-winning film, "Chariots of
Fire,'' Liddell managed to negotiate an unheard-of switch
from the 100-meter race he had been scheduled to run to the
400 meter, for which he had not trained, later in the week.
On July 11, 1924, Liddell won that race and was showered
with Olympic glory.
Instead of cashing in, Lidell turned his back on fame and
fortune and followed in his parents' footsteps, becoming a
missionary in China, where his most powerful contributions
to God and to his fellow humans were made.
In our day of focus groups and leadership weakened by
uncertainty of belief, Eric Liddell's example continues to
stand out. A fanatic might have demanded that others not run
on Sunday, either, and organized a group to enact
legislation to conform society to his point of view. Not
Liddell. He just said he wouldn't run. Some newspapers
denounced him as a traitor to his country and king. How
quickly they changed their tune when he won a gold medal.
Had he yielded to temptation and compromised his beliefs, we
might never have heard of him again.
The account of the race in the July 12, 1924, Times of
London conveys the excitement of that day in Paris: "Liddell
had the outside berth -- generally considered the worst
place .... There was a perfect start, and from the first
jump-off the pace looked, and was, terrific. Two men of the
six fell .... But that made no difference, for there was
never more than one man in the race, and it was the pace he
set that fairly ran them off their legs. Sweeping round into
the straight Liddell led by four or five yards, and
increased his lead by a couple of yards more in the run
home. No one ever looked like catching him .... "When the
time was given out as 47 3-5 sec., and it was realized that,
for the third time in two days, the world's `record' had
been lowered, the Stadium went insane ....'' When Liddell
left Edinburgh for China the following year, the number of
people wanting to bid him farewell was so large that 1,000
were unable to get in. Twenty years later he was taken
prisoner with other missionaries and Westerners and became
one of 1,800 crowded into a Japanese camp. His personal
space had shrunk to 3 by 6 feet. Before his arrest, Liddell
managed to get his wife and two children to safety in Canada
(Florence Liddell was pregnant at the time with their third
daughter, whom Eric would not live to see). He died of a
brain tumor on Feb. 21, 1945.
His biographer Sally Magnusson recalled that most people who
knew Liddell observed the consistency of his life. She tried
to learn whether he had "clay feet.'' In her book, "The
Flying Scotsman,'' Magnusson thought she might have
discovered something when she "happened on a disillusioning
eyewitness account of the behavior of some of the
missionaries in the Japanese internment camp where Liddell
spent the last months of his life.
I read of tempers lost and heavy moralizing, of
exclusiveness and selfishness. The author scarcely had a
good word for anyone.... Then I turned the page and found
this:
`It is rare indeed when anyone has the good fortune to meet
a saint, but he comes as close to it as anyone I have ever
known.' Of course, he was talking about Eric Liddell.''
Magnusson adds that thousands of people live similar lives
in obscurity and the world does not know their names. "And
the first to remind us of that would be Eric Liddell -- who
would be full of embarrassment at the very idea of being the
subject'' of a book or film.
At the end of "Chariots of Fire,'' producer David Puttnam
put on the screen: "Eric Liddell, missionary, died in
occupied China at the end of World War II. All of Scotland
mourned.''
Press accounts of the 1980 premiere of the film in Edinburgh
told of huge crowds. How fitting. The people of Scotland,
who had shared their native son with China, were welcoming
him back and affirming the note given to Liddell by his
masseur before that 1924 race. It referred to the Biblical
passage 1 Samuel 2:30: "He who honors Me, I will honor.''
And so He did. And so He still does 75 years later.
Randy Walker http://inspirations.spunge.org Join-Inspirations@lists.spunge.org