The title of this blog emerges out of a book by John Sexton, Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game, which, in turn, emerged out of course that he taught while president of New York University. Once, an “impious” student told Sexton that his deep love for baseball was silly and the student couldn’t understand why any one would waste time on the game. Sexton took this as a challenge to convert one of the “great unwashed,” and to show that baseball had depth and complexity far beyond innings, hits, and runs. Sexton taught the student through an independent study course and assigned 12 books that would explain how baseball could truly be a road to understanding God. The course was a success and word of mouth spread the good news of this course among other students. Soon enough, Sexton was a teaching one of the most popular courses at NYU which was waitlisted each semester. Sexton’s book is a distillation of the course and his further reflections on baseball and theology.
At the crux of Sexton’s argument for baseball being a road to God is a quote by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel:
God is not a scientific problem, and scientific problems are not capable of solving it…[T]he problem of God is not only related to phenomena within nature but to nature itself; not only to concepts within thinking but to thinking itself. It is a problem that refers to what surpasses nature, to what lies beyond all things and all concepts. The moment we utter the name of God we leave the level of scientific thinking and enter the realm of the ineffable.
In a culture that highly values (or previously, highly valued, before the “post-truth”/”post-facts” movement since fall of 2016) evidential reporting of facts and stable, reliable sources of truth, moving from an objective worldview to a subjective one is daunting, especially when it comes to religious grounding. We prefer the concrete to the abstract when it comes to our religious sensibilities, which explains the plethora of American religious (truthfully, mostly Christian) leaders who promise concrete rewards and benefits of becoming an adherent to their particular brand. A yearning for concrete religious realities also explains the broad appeal of religious fundamentalism. Namely, if religious faith can be easily and neatly defined by a checklist of doctrinal, dogmatic, or praxis-based items, then discerning if one (or one’s neighbor) is on the “right” team becomes so much easier. Rigid litmus tests, especially of social and cultural practices, can constrain faith and her adherents, possibly obliterating the mystery of God (Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans).
If, however, we embrace the ineffable character of God, our eyes can be opened like the Cleopas and his heading to Emmaus, post-resurrection. The ineffable is that which cannot be named, nor should it be. God’s ineffability is a constant reminder that, although we humans are smart, technologically advance, and inching ever-so-closely to physically immortality, we are still human, made a little lower than the angels as the Psalmist writes. God cannot be named for naming is the first step to ownership. As much as we want desperately to control and own everything we touch, God is that which is beyond our control, beyond our ownership, beyond, even, our existence. And truth be told, that really unnerves us. It unnerves me most of the time, too.
Sexton’s contention that the ineffability of baseball (that sense that there is more behind the obvious) can offer a glimpse into the ineffability of God is instructive for me. For as a minister, my calling is to be, in the words of one of my mentors, a “theological broker,” meaning that I try to point people to look beyond the concrete and into the ineffable character of God. While the Apostle Paul is correct, that we can only see partially now the truth of God but that one day we will see it in full, we can not use that nescience as an excuse for inaction.
And so, baseball and faith share some commonalities: saints and sinners, sacred spaces and seasons, doctrines and rules, doubts, miracles, scandals, blessings and curses, community, and nostalgia. But both also share the conviction that there is more to understand and behold beyond the surface. The deep is calling to deep, if only we have the courage to listen and strength to explore. May we find that courage and strength like the great saints of faith and baseball have before us.
The Ineffable Pastime 