Tonight I’ll throw out the first pitch at the Big Train
baseball game. It’s been a long time
since I stood on a baseball field and actually threw a ball. I played a little intramural softball in
college but that’s softball and college.
The real baseball triumph was when I seven years old.
When I was seven years old I went to the ‘show’. Well, it was the ‘show’ to me and the only
‘show’ I would ever know. On a hot July day I played right field for the
LaCrosse, Washington Pee Wee baseball team.
I played that day because they weren’t enough boys and I was the next
best choice.
My interest in baseball waned as I grew older as did my
interest in church. I came back to the
church in my late twenties. By
coincidence or design I came back to baseball a few years later.
Religion and baseball, at their best, find the sweet spot
where the secular and sacred meet sending a God experience into the bleachers. A shortstop backhands an impossible grounder,
wheels and throws to second base where it is sent on to first with equal grace. A double play, an exquisitely executed double
play. The ineffable. The heart stopping, breath stealing
experience of something greater than ourselves.
If you’re on the right side of the double play that’s good,
but baseball is about coming home. Coming home and hearing the umpire shout
“safe”. What a perfect metaphor for our
spiritual journey. We’re always trying
to find home and hear the word that we’re safe.
And then we have to go out again, like Odysseus, to be changed and
challenged to come closer to the magnificence God created when God created us
and said, “This is very good”.
On the one day of my brilliant baseball career I didn’t get
a hit. I walked once and was hit by a
pitch but I came home twice. It’s like the bread in my hands, the wine that
stings my throat and the peace that passes all understanding that passes
through me. I’ve found home but I can’t
stay. I have to go into the world. I
have to go out and try to connect again the sweet spot of secular and
sacred. I have to go out and discover more
of who I am and more about the One to whom I belong.
Last April, when the baseball season was starting, a
parishioner handed me a book, saying: “I
think you’ll enjoy this”. The book was Baseball as a Road to God written by her
client John Sexton, president of NYU and history of religion scholar. He wrote nine chapters to go with baseball’s
nine innings and the experiences of life:
Sacred Space and Sacred Time, Faith, Doubt, Conversion, Miracles,
Blessings and Curses, Saints and Sinner, the Seventh Inning Stretch (Sabbath
and retreat), Community and Nostalgia.
Baseball covers the length and depth of what is to live this
life and what it is to make of one’s life a spiritual journey. I know baseball isn’t for everyone, but
baseball has way of slowing us down and getting us to focus on what really
matters. It is, as Sexton points out, a
religious experience that draws attention to the faith, doubt, conversion,
curses, miracles and blessings we share.
One of the intriguing things about baseball is the way it
carries memory. The story of baseball
like the stories of scripture are remembered and told over and over again because
they hold the ineffable and give us a way to stand when times are tough,
confusion or uncertainty set in or we need courage.
The 1973 Mets were at the bottom of their division at the
end of July. They went to the World
Series riding on the words of Tug McGraw who said to them, “Ya gotta believe”. They were like Elijah sitting defeated in the
cave until a voice told him to get going.
Embedded in the story of the great Jackie Robinson is the call of God to
enlarge the neighborhood, to have courage and graciousness in the face of
hatred and to risk everything for the kingdom. The stories of baseball and the
stories of our faith are about us and about God and what we’re doing together.
Hidden in the shadows of right field, crouched behind home
plate, sitting in the bleachers, pacing in the dugout spitting sunflowers seeds,
standing on the pitcher’s mound is where the secular and the sacred meet.
Catching the impossible grounder or finding a way home is same movement that
life asks of us in order to become fully human. Most importantly baseball
brings echoes of resurrection. After the
men of summer have retired sides in October there is winter, that dark and cold
time when we wonder if the sun will return and spring will happen. Hope rises with the sound of a ball finding
leather and bats in places like Florida and Arizona. "The end is never the end. In baseball, as in life, the creed remains
true: Wait’ll Next Year". (Sexton)
