Elysian Fields

I've written, at least once before, about my deep love for baseball, especially as a Christian.  It's easy - oh so easy - to do that at the outset of baseball season, when the newness of it all gives every game a sense of tremendous excitement.  You win?  Great!  You lose?  Well, there's always tomorrow, and the friendly bar down the street from Wrigley to get you through until the next first pitch at the friendly confines.


It is a much colder and more broken hallelujah that is my refrain come this point in the season.  The Cubs (and Astros and Twins and Royals and whoever your team of preference that's underperforming might be) can't seem to do anything right.  You win?  You can hardly enjoy it, because you know it's not going to be happening again soon.  You lose?  The friendly bar down the street from Wrigley feels more depressed than friendly these days.


Somehow, though, it's possible to take the long view.  As a Cubs fan, that view has to be particularly long - all the way back to 1908, if you need a World Series win to be cheered up.  This year isn't The Year.  Next year - who knows?  But, maybe winning isn't everything.  It seems like a strange thing to say in a society obsessed with winning and losing (just think about Charlie Sheen's outbursts of some months ago, or Sarah Palin's insistence in calling the Democrats "the losing party" since the midterm elections), and in a sport where there are never ties because you play until somebody wins...but maybe baseball, and life, and faith, aren't ultimately about winning.  You hear that, Yankees fans?


Well...what does life look like when it's not all about winning?  It might look like a small town church softball team that loses by 20 runs, and laughs about it over a friendly beer afterwards. It might look a life measured not by how attractive our partner is, or how much money we have in the bank, or how many spectacular achievements our factory-made overachiever children have under their belts, but in laughter and memories and love.  It might look like a God who embraces the sheer barking madness of incarnation, becoming fully human in Christ Jesus to give us our only shot at ever being able to relate to God...and then experiencing the most profound suffering and injustice the world can dish out to further bridge that gap and invite us, through faith, into the neverending relational dance of the Trinity.


Maybe it's small wonder that the first true game of baseball was played at a riverside park in Hoboken, New Jersey called the Elysian Fields.