Text of Talk
HOLLY:
We’ve called this talk today “Baseball, Belief, and Jesus.” (It’s kind of too bad his name wasn’t Bartholomew - then we’d have some really nice alliteration). What is my hope with tying these three together? Well for starters I will have failed if I don’t make baseball fans out of everyone in this room. At the very least you will know how to grip a knuckle curve ball. Some of you know what October means in the world baseball - for Houston it’s looking like the World Series! Maybe like some of you I have a deep, sometimes heartbreaking love for baseball. I played softball quite competitively through college and listened to Milo Hamilton on the radio during Astros games. His voice was so often the background music in our household. While I could go on and on about all the ways I love this game, what it feels like to fly through the air and make a diving catch, or hit that game saving double, I want to talk today about the connection between baseball and spirituality. Going to a game is what I wish church was like - and not just for the beer and peanuts. Think about it. 43,000 people unified around one thing - this little, white ball. Without it, the magic cannot happen. But I’ll get to that in a second. For certain there are lots of problems with professional sports, but humor me with this metaphor for a bit.
When you’re at a game, there is this collective energy and no one seems to care who you voted for, how much money you make, what race you are, what country you belong to or who you love...but we are all there communing around the activity of this ball! It’s charismatic - we leap up with our hands in the air, clutch our hands to our mouths, cry, moan, laugh. We sing hymns: “Jose, Jose, Jose, Jose...Jo-oose” for Altuve. Or the canticle of all canticles... “Take me out to the ball game...” Everyone can follow along with the words and no one is left out. We hear the gospel according to Gerrit Cole: “Sometimes life throws you curve balls, but the good news is you get another at-bat.” During communion we receive halfway decent beer and reflect how things could’ve gone better or worse. We are - in short - a WE, a collective body. One meaning of the word church is “an assembly of believers.” And baseball makes believers out of us!
Bill:
(George Carlin material on baseball here.)
CARLIN ON BASEBALL
Baseball is different from any other sport, very different. For instance, in most sports you score points or goals; in baseball you score runs. In most sports the ball, or object, is put in play by the offensive team; in baseball the defensive team puts the ball in play, and only the defense is allowed to touch the ball. In fact, in baseball if an offensive player touches the ball intentionally, he’s out; sometimes unintentionally, he’s out.
Also: in football, basketball, soccer, volleyball, and all sports played with a ball, you score with the ball and in baseball the ball prevents you from scoring.
In most sports the team is run by a coach; in baseball the team is run by a manager. And only in baseball does the manager or coach wear the same clothing the players do. If you’d ever seen John Madden in his Oakland Raiders uniform, you’d know the reason for this custom.
Now, I’ve mentioned football. Baseball & football are the two most popular spectator sports in this country. And as such, it seems they ought to be able to tell us something about ourselves and our values.
I enjoy comparing baseball and football:
Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game.
Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle.
Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park!
Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium.
Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life.
Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying.
In football you wear a helmet.
In baseball you wear a cap.
Football is concerned with downs - what down is it?
Baseball is concerned with ups - who’s up?
In football you receive a penalty.
In baseball you make an error.
In football the specialist comes in to kick.
In baseball the specialist comes in to relieve somebody.
Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness.
Baseball has the sacrifice.
Football is played in any kind of weather: rain, snow, sleet, hail, fog...
In baseball, if it rains, we don’t go out to play.
Baseball has the seventh inning stretch.
Football has the two minute warning.
Baseball has no time limit: we don’t know when it’s gonna end - might have extra innings.
Football is rigidly timed, and it will end even if we’ve got to go to sudden death.
In baseball, during the game, in the stands, there’s kind of a picnic feeling; emotions may run high or low, but there’s not too much unpleasantness.
In football, during the game in the stands, you can be sure that at least twenty-seven times you’re capable of taking the life of a fellow human being.
And finally, the objectives of the two games are completely different:
In football the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.
In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe! - I hope I’ll be safe at home!
HOLLY:
I love going to games just to find some simple joy, engage with that childlike need for PLAY. Play predates the primate and human evolution toward language, ritual, and religion. Just the other night I promised a beer to some guy I’d never met before but fully embraced after 11 grueling innings. It was midnight and we’d been there for 6 hours! I’ll probably never see him again, but in that moment we were in total communion. This is beautiful. Two perfect strangers hugging like best friends. That right there is the holy spirit!
And, to draw out the cosmological similarities, the game can erupt from calm to chaos at any given moment. It is a dance of the two, just like the natural world. Dynamic Creativity emerges from disturbances in equilibrium.
I think there is also a deeper metaphor that relates baseball to spirituality, and this is where we get into the relationship between contemplation and action. Let’s go back to the interplay between the ball and the players. Inherent in this ball is explosive action, immense beauty, and creativity. Have you ever seen a really perfect knuckle curveball thrown? I can sit here and tell you what it’s like, I can show you how to hold the ball just so, but unless I put the ball in motion you can’t really KNOW it. Gerrit Cole’s knuckle ball absolutely mystifies!
What I am saying is the creativity of the ball is wholly dependent on being moved, on being acted upon to reveal its potential. The ball is like my concept of sacred mystery - it wants to move through us, and it needs us to be an active participant in its creative unfolding. Without this interplay, energy remains stagnant.
Bill
:
A HOUSE THAT IS ON FIRE
There is a quote that is attributed to the German priest who started what became the Protestant Reformation. He is attributed to have said, “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
I think that our spiritual/religious work needs to hold on to both sides of that statement.
To put it another way: we are all living in a house that is on fire.
What would you do if you woke up and discovered that your house was on fire?
Or, what would you want your neighbor to do if she or he saw that your house was on fire?
After I was diagnosed with coronary artery disease and a Sherman tank had been sent into my chest to address the matter, I asked my cardiologist if there was a cure for what I had. He said, “No. Remember what Buddha said: ’To have a body is like living in a house that is on fire.’”
Obviously you can’t run out of this burning house. We are all destined to grow old, get sick and die. Unless, like my cardiologist, you get murdered - or some other catastrophic event occurs.
We can, of course, do whatever we can do push that inevitable tide back. But, it’s coming.
Everything that comes into existence passes away. Everything. And, everyone.
Take organized religion as an example. It is estimated that between 6,000 and 10,000 churches close each year. It is hard to get accurate statistics because no one like to admit failure. A factor that has affected Protestant Christianity in the United States is the incredible fragmentation that the church experiences. The way it looks at the moment the UMC is going to experience a split in the coming year.
Video of religious change is shown here.
Look at what is happening to countries. Divisiveness and fragmentation rule the day.
We are living in a house that is on fire.
Figuring out a way to say this, more importantly to communicate this, that both conveys the urgency of the situation and a foundation of hope is a challenge for any spiritual teacher of any religious tradition.
There is a sense of urgency in the Jewish prophetic tradition that Jesus was part of. Prophets were not fortune tellers. They were people who said, “Look, if you decide to go camping and pitch your tent in the middle of Interstate 45, you are likely to get run over.I don’t want this to happen to any of us so . . .”
A prophet’s job is not easy. Jesus clearly commented on this and we can see what his prophetic stance got him. How is the urgency of what Jesus called “repentance” communicated without something thinking you are “taking sides.” Or, their feeling “judged”? Either one of those responses slams the door of both the head and the heart shut.
None of us likes this though I did grow up in a religious tradition where from time to time the preacher gave the congregation a good drubbing. It was part of the culture. Revivals were designed to scare the hell out of people, or people out of hell. Frequently in church services we were told how no good we were and that if we didn’t repent and accept Jesus as our personal savior, it was just too bad for us. And, just because you might have once walked down the aisle, that didn’t mean you were really saved. So, we are going to sing just one most stanza of “Just As I Am” with every head bowed and every eye closed.
If your neighbor’s house is burning down in the middle of the night, you don’t go in and say to your neighbor, “Can I adjust your pillow for you?”
Of course, the fact is that the prophet is taking sides.
And, a prophet’s job is different from a chaplain’s.
Now is the time to reclaim Jesus if in any way we claim to be Christian.
I encourage you to go to the website “reclaimingJesus.org” read the manifesto and see what you think for yourself.
Now it is time to deal with the matter of spiritual literacy regarding Jesus and see what it means to look like him in embodying his teaching - his loving, liberating and life-giving way of life. What might it mean for us really to reclaim his way of love? What would it mean for us to bring our own lives into alignment with Jesus who said such things as “blessed are the peacemakers,” “love your enemies,” “you cannot serve God and wealth,” and “love your neighbor”? What would it mean in practical, day-to-day living to remember and model our lives after this dark skinned Middle Eastern Jew who was unafraid to sit with those others considered unacceptable, unwilling to be owned and controlled by the powers that be, free to reach out to the friendless and the needy.
The church that blesses the status quo is not the church of Jesus.
HOLLY:
If we remain satisfied with the status quo, we don’t change, and if we don’t change we are missing the central metaphor of the Christ story - transformation. There is a theory that the very basic elements of life are compelled to commune and create. We are part of that compulsion - always changing and creating.
I love the question from poet Mary Oliver “What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” I want to pitch an idea about GoD, or sacred mystery. I’m coming to think of it as a
process
of deepening interconnectedness, definitely not a motionless, fixed thing. Not even as a preeminent thing. It craves interaction in order to keep evolving. It could not have remained a pinprick. It could not have remained mere light waves. It longed for diversity, for creativity.
Thomas Berry said, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” The key word here is communion. In baseball, it is the communion between the ball and the players that gives it life, makes it magical. Add in the fans and this triumvirate is a special kind of holy! I think the same is true about our spirituality. If we don’t connect beliefs with action, if they don’t inspire us to be the best of ourselves, what good are they?
In baseball, the ball itself possesses the potential for transcendence. It sails for 429 feet - the distance of Yordan Alvarez’s record setting homer. Josh James whizzes it at 99 mph. It curves and bends and produces unimaginable human feats - leaping bounds, diving snares, pirouettes followed by a laser like throws. Without the ball none of this is possible. Similarly I can’t just sit here and cheer at the ball or pray over it and expect it to move. It simply won’t happen. The ball needs to be acted upon. The ball needs us and we need the ball. It’s a mutual interdependence.
It seems to me that a really important question to ask ourselves is what do we believe about this ball, about sacred mystery? So much of what happens is immediately out of our control once we let go of it. Einstein was known to have said “The most important question facing humanity is, ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’” If we say we believe in friendliness - things like equity, justice or compassion - but do nothing about them, none of those come into being. It’s the equivalence of 18 suited up players coming out to the field, standing around the ball and expecting it to do something. Aligning our beliefs about a friendly universe with friendly actions requires intention and practice.
A pursuit of science and spirituality, of cosmology and mysticism, is imagining a unified Theory of Everything. Both branches of spirituality and science operate under the premise that every aspect of existence - living and nonliving - is interconnected. We are made up of molecules that belonged to dinosaurs and stars, and when we die, our molecules will become part of something else. While there are many ways to have mystical experiences, a common thread seems to be a deep sense of belonging and interconnectedness. When we are practicing with a mind toward friendliness, toward inclusivity, we begin to understand that what we do matters. In the midst of that, if we are willing, we also begin to see the ways in which we have acted in opposition to or completely blind to interconnectedness.
So much of what keeps us from picking up the ball is fear - will I be good enough? Do I even matter? What will others think? I don’t understand “these people”….This is such a primal instinct, but acting out of fear rarely serves us. But when we move through the fear, magic happens.
A great pitcher, like Gerrit Cole, understands his relationship to the ball - that it must move through him and he through it. The magic of one cannot occur without the other. It is a co-creative dance. The legendary Duke basketball coach, Coach K, spends weeks with his players on movement and envisioning without the ball. Of course they can’t play the game this way, but once they touch the ball, the practice of imagination takes shape.
I want to imagine a world where our beliefs about the sacred raise us to new levels of being in the same way the ball brings out the best in baseball players. It is collective participation that makes the game exciting. If George Springer just decided in the 6th inning to sit down in center field and not get up, if even one player did that, the game is completely altered - it won’t work. People like Thomas Merton speak of the importance of contemplation and action. Richard Rohr’s whole ministry is named such. Thich Nhat Hanh named it Engaged Buddhism. Today we often hear the term spiritual activism.
Jesus said: Practice what you preach
Ghandi said: Be the change you want to see in the world.
Einstein said: Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics.
Cosmologist Brian Swimme’s mentor was Thomas Berry, and Berry is said to have told him this that set him on his life’s path: “You scientists have the stupendous story of the universe . . . But so long as you persist in understanding it solely from a quantitive mode you fail to appreciate its significance. You fail to hear its music. That’s what the spiritual traditions can provide. Tell the story but tell it with a feel for its music.”
So you see this is both a scientific and spiritual quest.
Meaningful participation is the combination of our belief and practice. We’ve got to pick up the ball to be in the game, to engage our spiritual imaginations and challenge our beliefs to inform our behaviors. I have heard it said that one of the highest forms of spiritual practice is actually being in love with the world, wanting to be part of this beautiful creation. Author and systems thinker Jeremy Lent said, “We are not here defending nature. We ARE nature defending itself.” Disconnecting ourselves from this reality is incomplete spirituality.
Belief and practice are incomplete without participation. Again - imagine baseball without the ball. It is an absolute truth that connection is at the basis of all of existence - even on a molecular level. We need to ask ourselves with utmost seriousness, do our behaviors support or deny connection - what some might call LOVE? This is a question we need to take absolutely to heart.
Of course the difficulty arises when our beliefs differ. I suspect we won’t ever agree on one absolute truth. But I think I heard a wise man once say - in this very room - that we can start by imagining the most loving person we know, emulating that, and in this way we ooch a tiny bit closer to God.
I want to offer a story, told to me firsthand by Will Reed, a Methodist preacher and the president of the Justice for Our Neighbors board. A few weeks ago, he visited a detention center near intercontinental airport. He was there to assess the need and see if JFON could help any of the detainees. In one of the holding cells was a young father, just weeping. He came to the front of his cell and pleaded with Will, “Donde estan mis ninos? Donde estan?” Where are my sons? You see he came with them, both under 5, surrendered himself and his sons at the border to seek asylum 9 months ago. They were removed from his care for “processing” and he has not seen his sons since. He has no idea where they are. I cannot even imagine that grief. To say I would be a wreck - a total wreck - if my kids were taken from me and I was utterly powerless to do anything about it is an understatement.
How to fix the structures of immigration may be a partisan issue. But separating children from parents is not partisan - it’s a human issue. In sacred spaces where we say we prize compassion, we have to talk about these difficult human issues. If we align ourselves with Einstein on the matter of friendliness as well as with Jesus on the issue of compassion, we realize very quickly that who we are challenged to love most deeply are the most oppressed. I don’t always do this well, but I want to. I want a Jesus kind of inclusive love to be the arc of my curve ball.
Inclusivity is different from diversity. Diversity is an optical thing - you can get a little bit of everyone in a room and call it diversity. But inclusion is about what we are willing to talk about, how were are willing to examine and shift our beliefs to actually do what we say. If we say we want diversity in this class, for example, but we aren’t including difficult conversations about domination systems and oppressed groups, if we aren’t stretching our minds to think differently, then we can’t learn to act differently. Gerrit Cole does not keep pitching the same one pitch hoping it won’t get hit. He adjusts. He shifts. He invesitgates the problem and throws accordingly.
When asked about baseball, Einstein said it would be easier for a lay person to understand relativity that for him to play, nevertheless he has some good advice about how to engage with the ball.
“If we decide that the universe is an unfriendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to achieve safety and power by creating bigger walls to keep out the unfriendliness and bigger weapons to destroy all that which is unfriendly and I believe that we are getting to a place where technology is powerful enough that we may either completely isolate or destroy ourselves as well in this process...If we decide that the universe is a friendly place, then we will use our technology, our scientific discoveries and our natural resources to create tools and models for understanding that universe. Because power and safety will come through understanding its workings and its motives."
BILL:
My sense is that we live in a lot of houses that are on fire: our bodies, institutional religion, our nation. The situation is both critical and urgent. And, like Luther, our response is to continue to plant our trees. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do what we can to right injustices.
For one thing, most of us could stand to be a whole lot more aware. That the issue of long-seething racial injustice in this country. Add to that the rise of white nationalism in this country, as well as around the globe. To the person who says, “Well, we’ve always had racism.” True. But, we haven’t always had the internet that allows for maximizing the power of group hate that we have today.
(The book Tears We Cannot Stop)
I presented a situation to my spiritual director that concerned me to no end. It was a serious, critical, urgent matter. The first question she asked me in response to what I had said - and this is so humbling if you yourself happen to be a spiritual teacher - was, “Do you pray for him?”
There is a saying in the Buddhist tradition: when the student is ready, the teacher appears. That teacher doesn’t always show up in kindly garb. Sometime the teacher is in the shape of some person or some situation that really gets our goat.
Robert Johnson, in teaching us about “the Shadow,” said, “What gets your goat likely says a lot more about you than it does the person or situation that upsets you.”
At any rate, spiritual teacher Thomas Keating, who died just recently, and who brought a form of Buddhist meditation to Christian contemplative practice in the form of Centering Prayer, wrote a prayer that I will offer to you.
When you pray, do so, several times. Start with the teachers and teachings you are genuinely warmly thank for. Then, as the Buddhists teach, widen the area of your awareness to include everything that comes into your life - the political commentator you don’t like, the things that might constitute “prophetic statements,” etc. Notice where praying such a prayer takes you. What comes to mind. What your resistances are? What you learn about yourself and where you are in your own growth of freedom and love - the only ways we really have of measuring “spiritual growth.”
Here is Keating’s prayer:
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
I welcome everything that comes to me today
because I know it’s for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons,
situations, and conditions.
I let go of my desire for power and control.
I let go of my desire for affection, esteem,
approval and pleasure.
I let go of my desire for survival and security.
I let go of my desire to change any situation,
condition, person or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and
God’s action within. Amen.
