My Life as it appeared in full one summer afternoon at Coleman Park

You can tell a lot about the little guy in right, if you take time to look

I am thinking of a day when I was about 8, I guess, or perhaps a little younger, and for me, most momentous. I was wearing, quite proudly, a pair of what looked like wool-blend bloomers for britches, with a matching shirt that was way too big. I had a brand new…wait for it… baseball mitt from Sears, one whose fingers were not sewn together.

Neither did I have a hat or shades against the sun, but I had made ample use of Brylcream. (Hey! I needed to style and profile as I was playing in my first official baseball game in Nashville’s NBA [that is, Nashville Baptist Association] league): Radnor Baptist vs. Saturn Drive.

The early-season match-up featured two of Nashville’s former league contenders, but this year’s prospects for both were rather more grim. I played for Radnor and would several more seasons, at least till my next-door-neighbor convinced me to play elsewhere.

I was the youngest on the team and, therefore, was sent to play right field. You know what they say about right field.

Our pitcher was a first-timer by name of Johnny B_____, who had buzzed red hair and no eye for or ability to find the umpire’s generous strike zone. I had had a bad feeling about it before he took the mound, but the coach and Johnny’s dad were friends and, well, you know how it goes.

And you can guess how it went. He walked the first six he faced without ever so much as flirting with the plate, and the coach had to make a move as we were already down 3-0 and no end in sight to the carnage.

Young as I was, I knew I was a better pitcher than either Johnny or anyone else coach might have put on the bump, and so, when the change was about to be made I ran in from right field waving my arms, yelling for the coach to choose me. Which of course he didn’t and so I moped back to right field.

Not for the last time by any means (and not just in baseball) I said, “Here am I! Here am I!” to those who did not call on my name.

Later, I would become and All-Star pitcher and an MVP—I am not sure but what Johnny might have given up the game early—but on that losing afternoon it was not my time, and the mantle was not mine to assume.

Parable, that? For me, a retired work-a-day pastor (you know what they say about pastors)?

Now, on the other side of priestly retirement, I am again in right. In DEEP right field. And I am wondering if it may be time for me to wave my arms and call out again in hopes of getting back into the game as a prophet, not formally and not for many innings, but as a “closer,” so to peak, not that I can get us out of the full-blown jam we are in but maybe if I throw a few prophetic strikes, it will close the book on me and my work. That much, at least.

I am warm. To mix positions, for the last 18 months I have been in the bullpen, keeping my arm loose and ready (read: preaching week-by-week at two tee-nintsey little congregations where no prophet has ever gone, where no prophetic word has ever been spoken, to a people who might already be a field of dry bones.)

Put me in, Coach!

Why would I so much as think this is the time for me to take on a mantle as mis-sized as that old uniform? How do I know I am not as misguided as I was at Coleman Park all those years ago?

All I can say is that I have, just today, finished reading Fr. Rohr’s last book, The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, and as things would have it, I wept all through its final chapter on “Unconditional Love.” In what may be his last formal words he writes:

We need to stop being surprised or shocked by reality and recognize that evil flourishes best when it is denied. Evil relies on being considered rational, necessary, and expedient by otherwise good people. Witness the ravages of communism and Nazism, when everyday people could not see how their shadow side, in completely different ways, was causing them to demonize and kill millions of their fellow humans… You can’t see what your group cannot see.

...such classic dualistic thinking relies on a complete denial of what it does not want us to see, as we witness in so much American political speech today...

We still need...those who expose the works of darkness and speak uncomfortable truths to us with courage and a proper humility, the kind that leads to weeping, not to anger, blaming, and shaming.

Our job, like that of the prophets, is to guide (the) struggle toward love.

Christianity is not a purity cult that we use to prove we are superior beings...see Matthew 23:13- 29, where Jesus names the scribes’ and Pharisees’ hypocrisies, calling out their blindness and foolishness on issues of legalism, insincerity, cursing, “straining out gnats and swallowing camels,” externalized morality, keeping up appearances and killing those they pretend to follow…

Just wondering if, as I decrease, I must also increase? Probably not, but here I am, Lord. You know?