There's a picture of me that was taken when I was about three years old in which I'm wearing an adult-sized Cubs hat that's tilted over one eye. I look totally filled with joy over life in general and the Cubs' prospects specifically. I love this picture because it captures probably the exact last moment I felt that kind of uncomplicated happiness over the Cubs (or, I would guess, life in general).
There have been many years when I haven't really followed, or pretended not to follow, the game. I know this is typical fair-weather-fan behavior, and I'm not always as devoted or committed as I want to be, but the thing is, I just get too emotionally involved. It hurts so much when they lose, and I make myself insane. This year I thought it was safe, but the Cubs went through a bit of a rough spot the past couple weeks - people on the DL, Aramis Ramirez suddenly returning to the Dominican Republic for the birth of his child, and didn't Ryan Theriot have the stomach flu during the Giants series? I was trying to block that out of my mind. Anyway, at some point or other in the season I often start to feel, as Anne Lamott wrote, "like the cocky heroine in an ugly hubris drama" involving "an onslaught of thunder and silent screams, with cymbals, fangs...I mean, who needs it?" (I wrote this last week, and I still feel that way, but as of this moment, Rami, Reed Johnson, and Z are all back, we just won our series against the Cardinals and will be sending seven players to the All-Star Game, and everybody seems to be feeling more hopeful. Fingers crossed, as always.)
Cliche as it is, though, baseball and religion are pretty strongly linked for me. So this year I'm trying to hang on through those rough spots, to love the team when it's losing or otherwise unlovable just as much as I do when we're in first place, as we are at the moment, because for some reason God is into that kind of thing. My other baseball-God connection is this: a while ago my friend R., a Red Sox fan, and I talked about how, in other sports, the most thrilling moments involve lots of running, throwing, punching: in short, exciting physical activity. But in baseball, about 90% of the most thrilling moments we've seen involved some man staring into the camera for a very long time, then spitting emphatically while another man flashes him incomprehensible signs. Just like my spiritual life!
Okay, possibly the parallels are not exact. But in some ways, my spiritual life has been so much like this - for example, most of the important stuff takes place during long stretches of what appears to be nothing. All those days of reading the Daily Office and trying centering prayer and worrying that nothing is happening, or ever will happen, somehow opens up a space for the real work to go on, and from time to time I realize how much has been going on without my being aware of it.
Well, on the back page of the Chicago Sun-Times on June 21st, there was a delightful picture of Aramis Ramirez being congratulated by his teammates after his game-winning home run against the White Sox. They were all touching each other in that un-self-conscious baseball-player way, and they looked completely overjoyed, almost like me in that picture when I was a little kid. My mom, walking by, paused for a long moment to look at this picture. She shook her head in this really fond way and said, "The boys of summer." "I love baseball," I said. Which I do. So hello again, and thanks for reading!
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