I imagine we’re all aware of the image of the prizefighter sitting on his stool in the corner of the ring between rounds. I expect he’s at least a little bloodied, perhaps quite a lot. He’s attended to by people who are there to care for him but there are a whole lot of people on the immediate periphery who are there just for the show. And, maybe, there’s a broad TV audience of millions who are fascinating or are betting or who just like to be around when the carnage is laid bare.

So, with encouragement and the interventions that help him shake off the pain and physical limitations, he awaits the sound, knowing that he must try to stand again and greet what inevitably comes.

He awaits the simple sound of the bell and he arises to answer it.

All other noise fades into the background. All of his attention is focused on the thing that is right in front of him. This is a thing that will, inevitably, involve pain but just may involve triumph. If only he can persevere.

And so it goes.

We all know this drill. We’ve known it for as long as memory serves. I’ve known it in many forms. We seek rest and sleep at the end of the day, knowing full well that the morrow will bring many things, some of which may be kind and some of which may be a threat.

We stand up at the bell, with an innate sense that the next few moments may bring death or they may bring life. The next few moments may bring great joy or they may bring sorrow. Am I wrong?

Or, perhaps, we arise without a sense of either. We awaken to complacency which is another way of describing a kind of cocoon. We go about our business as if the business of life is the only thing we know. It’s just profit and loss. Nothing else.

Returning to the ring, what is victory and what is defeat? The prizefighter is not complacent or at least that’s not a good reason to enter the ring in the first place.

Rewind the tape and we see a whole lot of conditioning. A whole lot of hard preparation. We don’t get to adulthood without facing all sorts of challenges, the more fortunate perhaps skating to this level without great suffering or tragedy while others face it from Day 1. The prizefighter knows that victory comes at a cost. He recognizes that there is no gain without a whole lot of pain. He does not push back the pain but lives into it, recognizing that steel is forged from fire, not from softness and security. The warrior knows this, too, and we stand up in admiration and thanks when he walks by.

Of course, all of this is metaphor. We are, none of us reading this, in the ring or on the field of battle. But we answer the same bell.

To us, what is victory or defeat? What does the conditioning look like? The preparation of both body and spirit? Is the dreaded knockout blow the final moment, after which we cease to exist at all? Is all of our preparation and conditioning merely the attempt to get to some finish line that we call death and then there is a void that is actually worse than a void because a void can be the absence of something but we may not have even known the something in the first place. It was all a great deceit? Random particles and energy coalescing with no purpose that just happened to make a thing called Me?

The scientific materialists and atheists can’t help but ultimately reduce the goal of life to simple replication of DNA. If there is no purpose to creation, then any imagination that there is purpose to life is just that: imagination. Answering the bell is a function of birth, foraging for food and the means to sustain life, procreation and preparing to die. That’s the nature of the ring that is cordoned off from a non-existent audience. Sound bleak? Of course it is, despite all we do to dress it up with experience along the way.

Instead, when we raise our somewhat battered but still viable and hopeful eyes to the adversary across the ring, what is it that we see? To what do we aspire? For what do we endure the inevitable pain that comes only seconds after the bell?

Is it the hoped-for acclimation of hundreds or thousands or millions of fans who really don’t know us but see us as a symbol of something they long for? Is it money and fame and the material goods that we seek that will give us value and make it worth it?

Who or what is our adversary when you get right down to it? Isn’t it a desire not to be meaningless? Isn’t it that we will count as something? But, to whom or what do we go for that affirmation and how will that sustain us?

The enemy whispers that we are our own Lord and Savior. We are the ultimate conqueror. We deserve the acclimation and our moment in the bright spotlight of ardor, no matter how transitory, how fleeting. But, of course, the reality is that we will ultimately be beaten. Defeat always lurks around the corner. Death is inevitable.

But, let’s change the viewpoint. Let’s raise our beaten eyes or troubled hearts towards a bright light that is warm and beckoning. A presence so compelling that we must arise as if not of our own accord at the ringing of the bell. The acclaim of the fickle crowd disappears, to be replaced by the majestic voices of the heavenly host, each one of them focused intently on our own selves, as flawed as we are, recognizing that we are the reason for all of creation in the first place. The sound is that of Love, unbound, infinite, beyond human comprehension, resonating through every particle in existence.

And, so, we can slowly rise up on stiff and weakened limbs at the sound of the bell. But, without effort, our arms are raised high and extended, hands opened, faces devoid of pain but radiating light and tears of joy.

At the trumpet’s sound, we sing Glory Hallelujah! That is the sound of victory and we have arrived.