Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. -Rumi
I stood ankle-deep in a cloud of red dust, my shadow slanting long to the east and the bright gold sun setting to the west. In the soft dirt behind the church, I waited for one of the boys to overthrow so I could field the ball barehand and throw it in.
Finally, it came. The ball bounced off the well and kicked up its own cloud of dust, obscuring the ground so I scraped my knuckles on the dirt as I scooped and threw, sliding in my sandals.
In the middle of a desert in Africa, we were playing baseball.
Sure, I looked like a character out of A League of Their Own, pre-makeover, in a dirty knee-length skirt. Also, I didn’t have a glove. There were only two, and both right-handed, because sometimes life just isn’t fair or convenient to six-foot-tall left-handed females, so the right-handed boys got the gloves and I got the dirt behind the church to chase down overthrows as they tried to throw curveballs. But it was baseball.
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I don’t remember learning to throw a baseball. It is something I’ve always known how to do, just like I’ve always understood that loving baseball involves a certain level of mysticism. My dad would stand in our front yard and play catch with Alex and I, talking about stats and telling stories about my PawPaw, but what he was really doing was imparting secrets of the universe.
Throughout the spiritual ups-and-downs of my suburban American upbringing, baseball was constant. Like Annie Savoy in Bull Durham, I believe in the church of baseball.
In high school, baseball became prayer. Long afternoons of softball practice in the Texas heat dripped by in a haze of demands- Jesus, it’s hot, please end this soon– and contemplation. Baseball is rhythmic, hypnotizing. Somewhere between first and second base is where most of my spiritual growth happened in high school, as I breathed deep and watched for the pitch and listened for the crack of the bat.
This isn’t an Angels in the Outfield sort of thing. The ways the Lord speaks to me is in repeated rituals, in acts that connect me to the depths of history, and baseball has a uniquely spiritual and American history that makes it easy for the Lord to show up. This puts me somewhere between pagan and heretic on the religious scale, probably. But I agree with Walt Whitman, when he looked at baseball and said, “It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.”
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After six-and-a-half months on the Race, it’s easy to start looking towards home. The planner in me wants to know what I’ll be doing when I get back in a little over four months, wants to worry at plans like a dog at a bone.
But baseball keeps me here.
The prayer that is baseball makes me breathe deep and look up, watch for just the next ball. The next throw, the next pop of a mitt.
Playing baseball in Africa as the sun sets to the west, towards home and spring training and the future, makes me look out across the fields of sugarcane and treasure all these things in my heart. It makes me want to remember what it feels like to be right here, right now, 21 years old and my whole life in front of me, and living a journey that sometimes feels like the middle innings of an afternoon game and sometimes feels like the last play of the World Series.
For those purposes, baseball is the best way to pray.
