Maybe it's more like baseball

on the "flexibly devout"

I’m at the age where a not-insignificant amount of my time is spent as a spectator at youth athletic competitions. It’s come as a surprise to me how much I enjoy this. One of my sons took up baseball recently, and I was reminded of the game’s unique splendor.

New England’s summers are short and intense. There are seven, maybe eight months here of mediocre weather. The winters are dark and long and soggy, sometimes completely frigid but always dark. I am a fan of winter, for philosophical reasons, but summer has not a fandom but practically a religion. When the weather is good, the days are long and the light has a quality to it I can’t describe. Ordinary objects sparkle. There is a clarity around the landscape that makes its edges more pronounced, its sightlines clearer. All year I wait for these three months and then all summer I hold my breath, not wanting to miss a second of it. We are having one of these mornings right now, actually- I can hear the sound of the wind in the trees and the light is hitting my butterfly bush just so, and I could cry for the sight of it. I am not lying, a dragon fly just landed on the branch that the light was hitting- if I described it as I saw it, an editor would cut things for being too romantic. Too many words, too much emotion. That’s how a July morning in the garden feels. You have to say less, for others to believe it. The waiting for this morning means that when it comes, you just shut up.

I’ve grown tired of words, of my words most of all. Standing in front of a room, intending to talk about God, you can choke on your own tongue if you’re not careful. It is not that you run out of things to talk about. I know enough about the tradition that I could talk for three hours every week for years, probably. No, the danger now feels to me to be talking too much. We can talk so much without ever once feeling the tensile-character of time, the depth present in it. Talking and listening allows us to accumulate knowledge without ever testing any of it.

But there’s no talking in baseball. 

See, even that is a lie. There’s a lot of talking, it’s just that none of it makes sense to me.

If football is about speed and force and soccer is a passing game, baseball gives an account of time. The game is slow. When the players are young, it can feel achingly slow. There’s a lot of waiting. There are a ton of mistakes. For those of us who hate mistakes, this is its charism. For every pitch and every swing, there are ten missed opportunities. The ball is a bit high, a bit outside. My poor kid is just standing there, barely missing getting hit, having to decide when to swing. It is a lot of waiting and holding my breath.

The crack of a bat hitting a ball, the sound of that same ball landing in a glove, and anticipation in the space between those two moments- so much of the game is just waiting. But I’m waiting for what could happen, for the very small moments when what is possible becomes real. These are the rules, the boundary line around what might happen. It often doesn’t, but when it does, more often than not there is a tear in my eyes. What I’m trying to say is that the game is beautiful because of how many ways it can go wrong. When it goes right I realize I’ve been holding my breath this whole time.

The space between the rules of the game and what happens on a Wednesday night is vast. But when you hear the crack of that bat or when your kid actually catches that ball, it feels like this!, this is baseball.

The game contains the errors, too. The best players minimize them, but no one erases them entirely. 

Modest things can become more than what they are. For a second there, this was the real thing.

Let me insist, here, that I know next to nothing about baseball. I cannot figure out how to properly keep score and I don’t know how statistics work. But even now when I remember the night my kid caught that fly ball, there are tears in my eyes. Every eye for a minute was on that ball, and we were all holding our breath to see what would happen. It was the bundled attention of that team on that ball that made it so beautiful. My son catches a ball a hundred times a day in our backyard, but no one is watching, and nothing depends on it. That night, during that game, his catch counted for them all.

Someone who knows baseball more than I will certainly find errors in my account. I know very little. What I do feel is the possibility that exists every time a group of players step on that field. It’s not a miracle and it’s not magic. It’s just the way the game is supposed to work. It often doesn’t, which is why those moments when things go right feel so special. But the game is set up so it might.

I wanted my kids to play baseball because I want them to love the game like I do. They need to learn the rules in order to play, and there is a lot of waiting around when you’re learning. I don’t think any of them are going to be professionals or make a living from the game. I don’t think people who don’t play are outcasts or sinners more than I. I just think it’s a beautiful game, more than that- that learning to play and to spectate allows them to enjoy the world in a different way. I think they’d be missing out if they didn’t know something about the game. I’m willing to make sacrifices for them to learn it- I cut into my free time and spend money taking them to practice and to watch professionals play. But for baseball, at least for me, there’s something better about little league than about the pro’s. It’s not one perfect pitch after another, met by a practiced swing. There’s so much improvisation. I love the learning.

I’ve been surprised over the last few years at how reticent adults are to teach children about the faith. From influencers who offer lists of questions to ask your pastor about how they talk about salvation, to “trigger warnings” on Good Friday services, adults seem quite reluctant to catechize their kids. Religion is treated like an encumbrance and a source of harm.

But what if it’s more like baseball? In both cases, I want my kids to learn because I think God (and baseball) are sources of great joy. I think baseball (and God) can teach them deep truths about being alive- about the importance of discipline, of attention, and of working together. I think God (and baseball) can teach them something about time, about how long things can take. Most of all I just think both are beautiful, the source of deep joy and an occasion for awe and laughter. In both cases, I can sit here on a July morning and say- in that moment I saw something true and beautiful and I’m so glad I got to know this. In fact, I want my whole family to know this joy, this deep wisdom about the world. I’m willing to make sacrifices to take them to games on Wednesday and church on Sunday because I think both will enrich their lives. This is just what our family does. (When it comes time to choose, we will choose God over baseball- they are of course not the same kind of thing.) But in both there is awe, and waiting, and so much joy.

Religion is not baseball and baseball is not religion. But baseball may be a better metaphor than, say, an airtight system of beliefs, or a hardened ritual. The goal of religious instruction, says Lindbeck, is to produce people who are “flexibly devout”;

“they have so interiorized the grammar of their religion that they are reliable judges, not directly of the doctrinal formulations (For these may be too technical for them to understand), but of the acceptability or unacceptability of the consequences of these formulations in ordinary religious life and language” (100).

We are not trying to produce experts; we want saints. In baseballs terms, we want that old lady in the stands at Fenway who keeps score the old fashioned way and remembers that one catch in 1980. She’s watched the game change, with the addition of the pitching clock this year and other changes before, but she sees how these new “innovations” actually have helped keep the game more the same. She resists easy despair. She’s seen enough baseball to recognize what keeps the game what it is, what changes are necessary, and which ones can be ignored. She’s interiorized the game.

She’s the one we want, when we think about children’s curriculum and service planning and “liturgy” and what worship even is. We only got this woman because someone played the long game, because she learned to love the game before someone drilled into her head all of the statistics and rules. In religious terms, she might be a saint. She knows when forgiveness is called for, or when discipline is what we need. She knows the joy that comes from paying attention, and that a lot of things are learned in silence, and waiting. She knows, too, the deep gratitude that comes over time when we don’t get what we want. I’d like more saints like this, heads down, eyes focused, waiting for those moments when the game is lit from within and we see beauty right where it is.