Like a lot of you, I suppose, I was disappointed that the
Petaluma National All-Stars were defeated in yesterday’s National Tournament
final of the Little League World Series.
When the last out was made, I looked at my daughter, whose classmate
Beckham is the younger brother of pitcher and left fielder Quinton Gago. She frowned and snapped her fingers and
said, “darn it!” and I shared her feeling.
But a moment later, I started thinking about what an incredible ride it
has been for those kids, and their families, and for their whole home
town. If they had won, we would be
celebrating the victory, and preparing for another game against Japan this
afternoon and the possibility of ultimate triumph. But because they didn’t, the real value of
what they accomplished stands out all the more.
The things that really mattered about the 2012 Petaluma National
All-Stars— the teamwork and camaraderie, the athletic feats, the opportunity to
play against the very best teams in the country and beat all but one of them,
the love and joy and civic pride that they inspired back home—these are the
things that will have a lasting impact on those boys’ lives, not whether they
won or lost the final game.
Sometimes life’s best lessons are the lessons of defeat. I myself came of age in the 10980s in a world
that seemed to me hell-bent on destroying itself. And I tried everything I could to get some
kind of upper hand in the situation. I
tried drinking and drugs and rock and rock-and-roll, with predictably poor
results. I tried achievement, putting in
time at an elite private East Coast college until my sophomore year when I had
a dream one night that I was standing at the foot of an enormous
escalator. I knew I was supposed to step
onto it, and that once I did there would be no coming back down and no turning
right or left, only a smooth, non-stop ride straight to the top, and that at
the top was…death.
I tried American electoral politics, and I found it to be a
cynical game for opportunists. I tried left-wing
Internationalism, traveling to Nicaragua in the midst of the civil war with a
volunteer construction brigade, where we met with a slick, handsome, and
charismatic young Sandinista Party official who gave a well-rehearsed speech
playing on our anger at our government and especially our hatred of Ronald
Reagan. Many of the folks in the group
were eating out of his hand, nodding and applauding, but I remember thinking
that here was the same old devil in another guise.
I decided that the disease of the world was in my self, and
so I went to the Zen Buddhists, to sit down without moving and look myself
straight in the eye. I learned a lot of
valuable lessons there, and none more so than the knowledge that all the
Japanese temple ritual and hours of cross-legged sitting could be a pretty, new
covering for the deep psychic structures of bad religion—shame,
self-righteousness, the desire to escape the world, and the longing to be taken
care of by a paternalistic authority figure.
And so there I was at last, almost in spite of myself, with nowhere to
go but Jesus.
“Do you also wish to go away?” he asks, and Peter answers
“Lord, to whom can we go?” This little
exchange encapsulates a whole story of admitting that you are beaten, and
nothing can help you now but unconditional love. It may be possible to become a Christian believing
that it will be the way to a quick victory over the world, but I’m not sure how
you could maintain a lively faith for long on that basis. There is in the gospel a profound realism
about the world, a realism that is sometimes mistaken for pessimism. And this pessimism is sometimes twisted into
triumphalism, as if the mission of God in Christ is to destroy the earth, and
all our human bodies, to save a few pure souls for heaven. When, in fact, Christ comes out of God’s unconditional
love for the world, to offer it the free gift of its own true life, which is
wisdom, and compassion, and glory.
But these are my words.
The words of Jesus, the words that are Spirit and Life, are “Eat my
flesh and drink my blood.” These are
realistic words, words that ground the work of saving the world in the human
body and its vulnerability to defeat.
They point the way to a world to come that is not the endless repetition
of the struggle for selfish advantage, nor is it final victory in that struggle. And many of Jesus’ disciples decide to
abandon him rather than walk that way.
The desertion of these disciples, like the talk about flesh and blood,
is the Gospel of John’s subtle way of foreshadowing the cross. Abiding in Jesus, allowing him to abide in
us, involves being realistic about the world, and admitting that it has us
where it wants us. It means choosing a
wholehearted engagement in the cause of life, knowing that life includes
suffering.
I was at Zephyr Graphics over by Pinky’s Pizza on Friday,
picking up a Soccer League jersey for my daughter, and I almost couldn’t get
one because they were so swamped with sales of Petaluma National gear. I got into a three-way conversation with the
cashier and a woman who was buying a stack of t-shirts for her family and they
were sharing about how much more satisfying it was to root for the Little
League team than for the professionals.
I’ve been at least a casual San Francisco Giants fan for many years, but
when I think about the millionaire players and the billionaire owners, and the
corporate sponsors and $30 for a ticket and $10 for a beer and how the layout
of the stadium is a microcosm of the class system in America, and the poor are
left out entirely, I have to agree with them.
There was an admission of defeat in that observation, a defeat far worse
than anything the Little Leaguers will ever experience on the field. It was the knowledge that they will come of
age in a world that is able to corrupt even something as good and beautiful as
baseball.
But as wounding as that knowledge is, following Jesus means
that it doesn’t lead us to cynicism or despair.
We do not condemn the world, no matter how painful it becomes, because
in spite of everything it still belongs to God, and God in Christ has embraced
it from within. He has given his flesh
and blood so that it might not perish, but live. To follow Jesus means to live by that gift,
the gift of God’s compassion for all who suffer from the world as it is, which
is to say, every sentient being.
But the gift is not
only compassion for suffering—it is also power for liberation. Following Jesus means not only that we give
up trying to conquer the world and turn at last to receive the gift of life in
its simplicity. It also means that we
join with him in struggle on life’s behalf.
As St. Paul says, this is not a struggle against flesh and blood. It is a struggle with the spirit of pride and
domination, who seeks its own hollow triumph at the cost of the destruction of
the world. The one thing this spirit
cannot bear to see is its own hopelessness, and it will go to any lengths to keep
us hooked on the false image of its power.
That is why it keeps after us, keeps trying to trick us into betraying
our own life and bending it to our own will.
And that is why we keep returning again and again to eat the flesh of
Jesus and drink his blood. That is why,
having exhausted all other options, we feed week-by-week on the humility of
Christ. Children of earth, we eat bread
and drink wine and in that God’s compassionate love and God’s liberating power
are real and present in us and for us, and that is life’s victory.
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