Secretariat

“There are moments in the experience of beauty whose ecstasy transcends all memory or vision of happiness, so that their unrelated present stands complete as an immeasurable stellar lifetime.” This passage appears in a 1924 book “Voyaging Southward from the Strait of Magellan, by American, Rockwell Kent, a “pagan in pursuit of happiness.” Nature often presented herself to him as bliss and the compass of a moral nature.

BUT for ME? I’ll take the few, final minutes in the film “Secretariat,” in which the big, red, equine gift of God to the world, is turned loose to run to his heart’s content, winning the Belmont Stakes in 1973 by 31 lengths setting the track record at 2:24. Neither the stunning victory nor the track record matter. This beauty experienced by an atheist writer would also not matter.

What does matter is the momentary, transcendent entry into the whirlwind of God’s power and beauty of God, transmitted to me as the free, pounding speed, sinew and heart of the quintessential racehorse.