On Tuesday morning, I celebrated the Mass of Christian Burial for Jack, a member of the STM community since he was just out of graduate school. He sang in the Yale Men’s Chorus, worked for many years as a Clinical Social Worker and was a beloved husband, father, brother, uncle and friend.

 A recurrent theme that ran through the beautiful remarks of remembrance, given by his brother, was that Jack was an avid athlete, and that he loved to run, often donning a very worn-out t-shirt emblazoned with the words: “Jack – the Man, the Myth and the Legend.” As is often the case with a runner’s non-runner loved ones and friends, his brother had to laugh. He was always impressed with Jack’s obsession with running, though he didn’t quite understand why that obsession still lingered, even after Jack couldn’t run anymore. As we often do when envisioning what Heaven might be like – for ourselves or for our loved ones who go before us – Jack’s brother imagined that part of Jack’s first few days in eternity, in addition to catching up with loved ones and lending his voice to the choirs of angels, would involve a 10K.

While I was listening to Jack’s brother reminisce, I was thinking about my left hamstring, which I tweaked early that morning while running a “T Swift Track Workout” with a couple of our students. It consisted of a ladder: 200 meters to 400 meters to 800 meters and then down. Mind you, it’s been about nineteen years since my last track workout – when I was fresh out of college, coaching and in the kind of shape where I could handily run fast and medium fast track intervals. Those days may be long gone. My left hamstring began its protest about 150 meters into the second 800 while Taylor Swift sang “Look what you made me do.”

And then I thought of a line from the first reading chosen for Jack’s Mass, from Chapter 3 in the Book of Wisdom: “They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction. But they are in peace. For if before men, indeed they be punished, yet is their hope full of immortality; Chastised a little, they shall be greatly blessed.”

“Yet is their hope full of immortality…” I think that’s why runners are still obsessed with running, even after their bodies can’t take the miles—or workouts—they ran in their youth. The thrill, the power, the freedom each step affords connects us to something bigger, something immortal—and asks us to pursue it with all the breath and stamina we have. There’s a deep hope in that. I also think that’s what drives us when we’re engaging in any endeavor that’s worth the work, the stress. It gives us courage when we have the potential to get hurt, or even to fail.

The hope always outlives the hurt, the failure. And even as I tend to my left hamstring, I am reminded that our hope is full of immortality—especially in this season of resurrection and new life.