Perseverance of Wilma Rudolf

Wilma didn’t get much of a head-start in life. Wilma Glodean Rudolph was born prematurely at 4.5 lbs., the 20th of 22 siblings; her father Ed was a railway porter and her mother Blanche a maid. Rudolph contracted infantile paralysis (caused by the polio virus) at age four. She recovered, but wore a brace on her left leg and foot (which had become twisted as a result of the polio), until she was nine. She was required to wear an orthopedic shoe for support of her foot for another two years.

At age 12 Wilma tried out for a girls’ basketball team, but didn’t make it. Determined, she practiced with a girlfriend and two boys every day. The next year she made the team. When a college track coach saw her during a game, he talked her into letting him train her as a runner.

By age 14 she had outrun the fastest sprinters in the U.S. In 1956 Wilma made the U.S. Olympic team, but showed poorly. That bitter disappointment motivated her to work harder for the 1960 Olympics in Rome — and there Wilma Rudolph won three gold medals, the most a woman had ever won.

The widow in today’s Gospel story might have been her source of inspiration.

Today in the Word, Moody Bible Institute, (Jan, 1992), p.10

Gratitude at the Holy Mass: Fr. Roger Landry beautifully explains the connection between the Holy Mass and Jesus’ thanksgiving. At every Mass we’re called to grow in this spirit of thanksgiving, because the Eucharist is Jesus’ own prayer of Thanksgiving to the Father. The Greek word from which we derive the word “Eucharist” means “thanksgiving.” During the Mass, the priest says, “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.” Everyone responds, “It is right and just.” And then the priest replies with a saying of great theological depth: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give You thanks, Lord, Holy Father, Almighty and Ever-living God.” It’s right, it’s just, it’s fitting, it’s appropriate for us to give God thanks,  “always and everywhere.”(All the eight “Prefaces of the Sundays in Ordinary Time” begin thus: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks, Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God, (through Christ our Lord)”  Before Jesus said the words of consecration on the night he was betrayed, the vigil of his crucifixion, he took bread and, as we’ll hear anew today, “gave thanks.” He gave thanks, because it is right always and everywhere, our duty and our salvation, to do so. He gave thanks because he was constantly thanking the Father. He gave thanks because he knew that the Father would bring the greatest good out of the greatest evil of all time which would happen to him after that first Mass in the Upper Room was done. He gave thanks because it would be through his passion, death, and Resurrection, that Jesus would institute the means by which we would be able to enter into his own relationship with the Father. The Mass is the school in which we participate in Jesus’ own thanksgiving, the thanksgiving the Church makes continuously from the rising of the sun to its setting.n.