Everyone believes in God. Especially atheists and U.S presidents.
This is because God means different things for everyone. Actually, the only way you can’t believe in God is by dying before you can cognize something other than yourself.
If you’re reading this, you might want to react to my claim. Some people might even be offended, which is funny because being offended by things that apparently don’t exist is, to my mind, irrational.
Anyway, enough trolling. I’m sincerely attempting to outline something poignant here: I’m writing about God because of Ayrton Senna.
I’ve had few heroes in my life that weren’t alcoholic footballers. Ayrton Senna has become one of mine, albeit twenty-plus years after his untimely death.
What I’ve come to learn of Ayrton resonates with how I see the world: you must live a hundred percent for what matters; otherwise, you’re not living at all. In the eponymous 2012 documentary, Senna, Ayrton comments about his relationship with God through the medium of racing. He describes his journey toward God poetically, as if being pulled toward a greater light where a modicum of sense exists beyond the inherent miscalculations of gross human existence.
(Photo Credit: Instituo Ayrton Senna / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2)
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Like all of us, Ayrton was a conflicted and conflicting figure. Despite what people thought of him and his actions, he was an individual: a person hell-bent on actualizing his terrestrial life with what he felt to be his ultimate purpose, the watershed moment of which materialized at Imola, San Marino, on Sunday, May 1st, 1994.
Watching footage both via Senna and other sources, Ayrton appears notably distressed the weekend he died. For anyone that remembers, this isn’t surprising, considering his protégé Rubens Barrichello luckily escaped injury on Friday, while the Austrian Roland Ratzenberger died in Qualifying on Saturday.
Watching Ayrton in the paddock before the race, it appears that he knows he’s about to die. The fact that his sister claims he read a verse from the Bible that morning stating he’d soon receive the greatest of all gifts – God himself – doesn’t lessen this sentiment.
Ayrton Senna was a lion of a man. He lived, died for that which he lived, and continues to live on in the hearts and minds of nameless multitudes. Regardless of your personal feelings toward what God might mean, Ayrton continues to present a compelling human face behind the propagation of that ongoing mystery.