Endless

That's faith, man.

But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”

Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”

Matthew 14:30-31

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After every goal, he points to the sky. One hands, two hands, on his knees. He prayed for this, he said, and God delivered.

He’s been praying for a long time. As a boy in Greenwich, pointing at the stars he would one day paint on his boots; as a young man pushed and jostled through the brutal machine of academy football, a system that will crush you into commodity unless you find a way of remaining a person; as a professional in south London, a dancer determined to dance in defiance of all his rejection. Because determined is the word. Let it all work out; it was meant to be; a story ordained, told in scripture, inevitable.

The non-religious struggle with religion. There are men in white robes up there, in the sky. But look, don’t just point: the sky is painted with glorious constellations that are provable and real, that people at Greenwich Conservatory have dedicated their lives to proving - what could possibly be up there more beautiful than a star? How could God’s glory ever compete with the miracle of nuclear fusion, of hydrogen becoming helium under the impossible law of gravity, a reaction that emits light so glorious we can see it from our windows, through glass that was once itself a star, through eyes that were built from matter that once exploded outwards from some other ancient and unknowable moment? To lay responsibility for the majesty of the universe with one will is to demystify it, and to remove the staggering beauty of chaos and chance.

But you’ve gotta give it to him. To score his first Premier League goal against Crystal Palace, the team who gave him everything; to do what he did last night, one two three, all so similar they must have been authored by someone, somewhere - it’s becoming really hard not to feel it. Eberechi 41:46-76. He prayed for three, and thus three arrived.

If you listen to him - or anyone, really - talk about faith, it all circles back to solidity, to structure. Faith is such an appropriate word when you understand it: it’s not the belief God is real that defines it, but the act of believing itself. “It allows you to see things with the right lens,” he said. “You don’t know what’s around the corner. The one solid rock and foundation is Christ. Having that allows me to deal with whatever circumstance I’m in.”

When you start looking for faith, you see it everywhere. And if you don’t see it in your own life, look again. “Never embark on an action without a clear end in view,” Marcus Aurelius writes in Meditations, “or otherwise than according to one of the principles which perfect the act of living.” We, we who were once stars, we who were born to move briefly through time, we who get to look at the universe through the universe, we who are alive - we need purpose, direction, and something unchanging to map our meaning on to; we need to believe.

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I think sometimes about, of all people, Ronan Kemp. I know it’s easy to sneer at the products of nepotism, but I relate to and admire him a little: we have both lost years of our lives to the same awful condition, but he had to cope with it in public, which is worse. I don’t think of him because of that, but for something sillier: a social media appearance he did once, clutching that gorgeous maroon kit from our final year at Highbury.

“This is the only constant,” he said, “that I will ever have. This is only thing that survives everything. Ex-girlfriends, girlfriends to come, foods that I like, movies that I like…that will all change. This doesn’t.”

It doesn’t change. In the tunnel on Hornsey Road, where Northbanksy has painted a mural of Eberechi Eze with the words ‘all roads lead home,’ a thousand voices sing beneath the pastel light of red flares, faces covered against the chemical smog, jumping to the rhythm of drums: it doesn’t change.

In the stadium, the old and the new: a mighty tifo of Thierry Henry, David Rocastle, Tony Adams and the last man to betray Tottenham Hotspur for the Arsenal, Sol Campbell, sharing space with Martin Ødegaard, Bukayo Saka and Gabriel Magalhaes as fireworks turn the cold into a maelstrom of furious red: it doesn’t change.

On the pitch, where Arsenal once again look near-unbeatable, a perfect blend of impassible stoicism and box-cage flair, where Spanish creators find diminutive killers with passes only they can see, where English stalwarts crash between boxes and throw opponents to the ground and laugh, where the attack in the final minutes was, as Ian Wright watched from the stands and Rocastle from wherever he rests in his power, all London, all Black, all Arsenal: Eberechi Eze, Noni Madueke, Ethan Nwaneri, Bukayo Saka. It doesn’t change.

The non-religious struggle with religion but we all wear the same colours and march together in our thousands. We hold strangers close and share in the holy communion of Willy’s Pies. We sing together, tell our myths of 49, 49 undefeated and raise banners to the sky: The Arsenal, my endless love. Endless. North London, forever. Forever. Time is immaterial, this church has endured, will endure, until it can’t any longer, until it returns to the stars, until all the people that cried and laughed and found each other here are gone and their memories have vanished, and all memory of them has vanished. It doesn’t change as long as we are all here to hold it together, together: it doesn’t change as long as we believe.

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He was just outside the penalty box, then inside it, then he’d scored. Three times, three times the same, patterned and instructed. It wasn’t a coincidence, his coach said: he’d returned from international duty and asked to see the patterns, to understand the shapes the wind might make. “Things happen for a reason.”

For the first, he arrived in the box late and Declan Rice knocked it down to him and he hesitated as a roar went up and the moment seemed to pass - but it wasn’t the moment and he knew that, he knew it’d come after another touch, then one more, and he knew as he moved the ball it would stay with him no matter how close the challenges came; this was not a matter of inches but of molecules, the space too small to see. And he finally takes the shot too late, much too late, as a blocking leg is in the perfect position to stop it, but of course he’s right on time, and it pings beneath the goalkeeper.

For the second, the ball reaches him just outside the box and gets stuck under his feet for the briefest moment, but he lets it roll across, and this time in the absence of chaos and bodies he can pick precision, and with a little shuffle he manages to pop it out from under him and passes it towards the waiting embrace of the corner. He can barely conceal his mirth, and in that little gesture, hand over his snigger, he says so much: I could’ve been in white today, but something led me here.

For the third he takes one touch with his right foot, and Destiny Udogie careens past like a cartoon character and collapses at his feet, powerless in the face of this determined outcome; and Bukayo Saka is outside him, in the perfect position to curl it home as he has so many times before but this is history, this is ordained, this has to happen as it does, the ball has to leave his right foot with his second touch and shape gorgeously through the wind. You of little faith. Why did you doubt?

He believes in his God and himself and his teammates and his manager. It was all those together, not one alone, that led him to the edge of the penalty box, three times. One may take precedence in his mind but the truth I think is not that he believed in the right thing but that he believed at all.

We call belief many things: God, Allah, the present moment, fate, destiny, chance. The one constant with belief is someone, some person, has to do it. And it is a tiny thing, belief, a connection of neurons inside a bundle of flesh that used to be a star, so silly, so manufactured - it can cling to anything, real or imagined. As I grow older, I realise I called it trains to Paddington and the Piccadilly line, a growing wave of red scarves as the pilgrimage went on; I called it walking across the Ken Friar Bridge in the throng and knowing I had found something like home; I called it total community, forgetting myself entirely, and singing until my throat bled. My endless love, my one constant, my tiny silly thing. Endless, until my consciousness fades and I am buried and the matter I am made of returns to the earth, and still endless, beyond the day the sun superheats and everything that was here is vaporised, and everything we ever held exists as nothing but dust on the cosmic winds, still endless, until our star collapses and the fusion ends and nothing is left but whatever tiny fingerprint love leaves on the universe. Forever.

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