row2k Features
Notes for a Riverside Service in Memory of Fallen On the Banks of the Cooper River
June 9, 2006
Father Mike Siconolfi

An introductory note from IRA regatta director Gary Caldwell: Please find attached the notes from Father Mike Siconolfi that formed the framework of the memorial service that was to be held at the IRA Championships but got canceled due to weather conditions and race re-scheduling. The notes have been shared with Mike's fellow referees and regatta officials, but I thought there might be a larger audience out there of coaches, friends of John Cooke, Henry Petty, Joe Creed, Bernie Horton, Matt Ledwith, and Alex Capelluto who might be as moved by Mike's words as I. Mike has given his blessing so to speak, if you wish to share it with others. The following is excerpted slightly for space.




O God, you are the author and sustainer of our lives, and you are our final home. By the power of your Word, you stilled the chaos of primeval seas, you made the raging waters of the Flood subside, you opened the Red Sea, and you calmed the stormy waters of the Sea of Galilee.

We gather by these waters to commend and remember our fallen brothers Henry Petty, John Cooke, Joseph Creed, Bernie Horton, Matt Ledwith, as well as rower Alex Capelluto.

Trusting in your mercy, we pray that you give these our companions in rowing sweet tranquility and flat waters for ever. Grant them a place of rest and soft peace where the world of dust and ashes has no dominion.

Turn also to us who have suffered this loss. Strengthen the bonds of our community of officials, coaches, and rowers who so miss our brothers. Confirm us by the banks of this river in faith, in hope, and in love, so that we may extend your consoling presence to one another.

We ask this in your name. Amen.

Reflection
This regatta has been rowed for 104 years. And year in and year out the rowers are always the same - young, strong, dedicated, disciplined, and as nervous at the start line as they are nauseous at the finish. At the end of their season each year, they are starting to understand that about 90% of their sport is mental--if not spiritual. This is the same understanding that some of their great-grandfathers felt before them along the banks of another river, and their fathers before them along the banks of the grandfatherly Thames.

All rowers at this regatta have ever glistened with great potential at the start of the third decade of their lives. And so they will continue to be when this regatta is run for the 200th time at the end of 21st century.

When we officiate at these races, I suspect. we like officials before us, identify with these young rowers and imagine ourselves when we were their age. But try as we might to lose ourselves in nostalgia of what once was, the aches and pains of officiating for hours on end out on sun-burned or soggy water reminds us that most of us are no longer in our early twenties but now well beyond our "salad days, when we were but green in judgement."

And when we lose so many officials in one year, men who have become our friends out on that water, we feel even older and more fragile, we "band of brothers." For part of us, as John Donne noted, is lessened by their departure. The bell has tolled for us. And so has that finish line horn.

And when we lose a young rower such as Alex Capelluto from Yale this year or last year's Dad Vail winner Scott Laio from Boston College, we are struck by an almost obscene loss of potential, of what could have been but will not.

All these losses punch a hole in our hearts, and the early morning mist never stops whistling and whiffling through it. We cannot, as the self-help gurus would have it, simply "get over it," or "put it behind us," or come to some tidy sense of false if fashionable "closure." There is pain in these losses----and there should be pain. There should be suffering. But not fear.

Oscar Wilde, the English playwright and dramatist once observed, "Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom, sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. They are wrong. It is really a revelation: one discerns things through suffering one never discerned before." When we suffer the loss of friends, it is as if our very DNA has been wrenched apart. And so it should. For if the friendships were real and deeply felt, so must the sense of loss. "And let my cry come unto thee."

And one revelation that loss brings is that we need to revaluate regularly what matters and what does not in our lives. As TS Eliot once prayed: "Lord, teach us to care--- and not to care. Teach us to sit still."

Old or young, one hopes that all of us have found in and through the pain and joy of rowing that in this often plastic, spin-doctored world, in this world of moral shabbiness, something noble, something lasting, something honest, something fine has been born.

Jason Read, the Olympic stroke and Athens gold medal winner (and emergency aid worker at the WTC on 9/11), said that while he is a fiercely competitive athlete, he realized after 9/11 that athleticism and winning is really not what rowing is about. He has come, he told the press, to realize that it is about becoming the best at what one does as a tribute to God's creation.

He alluded to the fact that ours is a very odd sport without real opponents---only the novice rower considers the guys in the other shell to be the enemy. The enemy is the selfish and isolationist dark side within us.

This sense of a warmly competitive rowing community is a gift given to all of us no matter what our age-or waist size. It is a gift that shows us that great things are achieved, and even greater things mourned, when they are done with and for others. And officials old and young cling to this sport because it reminds them of something they did that was and still is selflessly fine.

Every generation of rowers--who are really rowers and not merely well-conditioned athletes with good erg times--has known the complete and cathartic happiness that can only be achieved when something well done is done well with and through others---not only whose stroke rates but whose heart beats have been as one.

For it is not merely the crush of oars in their locks and the incredible power of that first stroke, nor is it the leap and run of the shell at the catch, nor is it the burble of water singing sweetly under the keel at that almost mystical moment of "swing" when you are almost afraid to breathe, nor is it the beauty of an oar sculpting clouds reflected on the darkly deep waters of a hushed spring morning on lake or river---those are merely the extra benefits of what it is we are about.

The real joy of this sport resides in its companionship and honest intensity. And I tell you it is not unlike the joy which has already greeted our departed brothers.

We mourn our losses this day, but looking back at the past we take hope for the future-in both the young and very old at this regatta. May we, who are made in His image and likeness, continue to find the Lord in the relationships which this sport forges. May finding bits and pieces of Him in each other give us comfort in our sadness, certainty in our doubt, and courage to live through this hour and make our faith strong so that only flat water and smooth slides await us as when, at the finish line of the very last trumpet, the cry of the angels in the heavens will be, "Way-enough."

Closing prayer
Father of mercies and God of all consolation, You pursue us with an untiring love and dispel the shadow of death with the bright dawn of life with you.

Comfort this rowing family in their loss and sorrow. Be our refuge and strength, O Lord, and lift us from the depth of grief into the peace and light and calm waters of your flowing presence.

As you have give our departed brothers safe haven and unlocked for them the gates of life, grant to those of us here left on the shore of this present world a sense of gratitude for their lives and for the companionship that now sustains us in your presence in this our sport. Help us to see that Death is not end, that Death shall have no dominion, that Death shall die. We ask this in your name. Amen

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