Rounding Second Base

(Photo: The Charles Bridge, Prague, Czech Republic: Good Friday, 2017)

This post is a bit long, disjointed, maybe a lot of rambling, and yes, it might not make much sense, but in light of the week (Holy Week) and my last post, “Finding Freedom,” I was compelled to write it.

I have recently found myself thinking of a few short stories that my pastor in the States would bring up, time and time again, hoping that it would sink in.  Incredibly, life usually indicates whether you can receive the intended message when it is given to you.  In other words, you can’t rush the meaning if you aren’t ready to receive it.  And not being prepared to receive it doesn’t mean that there is a deficiency; it just means that we don’t have the ears to hear yet.  It doesn’t yet fit into our psyche, life experiences, and most importantly, our pain and struggles.

I say all of this to follow my last post about “Finding Freedom” (Link).  The changes in my life in the previous few years are natural and good, painful but good. And yet, the underlying shift that gives foundation to all other changes is my relationship with God.

I don’t understand this change fully and probably will never understand, but it can be better illuminated through the stories that my pastor would often tell.  So here are just two.

The first is the baseball diamond.  If, on average, we live to be eighty years old, each base, or base path, represents 20 years or so of our lives.  And for those who know anything about baseball, you have to make the turn when you get to a base, or else you will find yourself out in the outfield somewhere lost and confused.  This image has been beneficial for me because it normalizes the turns in my own life, knowing that everyone around me is making the same turns, with the same fears, struggles, joys, and freedoms that come with its journey around the bases—especially those who have made the “big” turn, rounding second base.  Whether you want to call it midlife, first half-second half, or whatever you would like to name this turn, it is a turn that opens you up to a whole different lens to see with, different ears to hear, and a new heart to live through.

This turn can come earlier for some, later for others, and sadly never for others.  It happens when it happens, and you can’t plan for it.  That said, you know it when it hits you.  Your world completely turns upside down, and what had worked before to help cope with life doesn’t work anymore.  I have heard it best described by Richard Rohr as a time to “discharge your loyal soldier.”  Your loyal soldier is what got you through the first half of life, very ego-centric but necessary and good.  For without it, you would have no “me” or foundation to stand on.  As Richard Rohr states, it is what gets us through the first half of life safely, i.e. to look both ways before crossing, to have enough impulse control to avoid addictions and compulsive emotions, while teaching us the sacred “no” to ourselves that gives us dignity, identity, direction, significance, and boundaries.  That being said, most of us fall in love with this place, and we “build a white picket fence” around it, believing that we are good if we can keep things just so.  We can rest easy if we can continue believing what we believe, obeying, and living up to these ideals (while deep down knowing that we don’t) while criticizing, demonizing, and controlling anyone who threatens this way of being.  Well, good for us, for the first half of life.  Not so much for the second.  Thank God.

Rohr goes on to say that paradoxically, this loyal soldier can give us so much security and validation that we might begin to confuse this voice with the very voice of God.

“If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God.  The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures.  His or her ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving.  Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not “the still, small voice” of God (1 Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power.”

-Richard Rohr, “Falling Upward”

Wow.  So much there.  Yet all of it seems to be part of rounding second base.  As I stated in my last writing, it is refocusing off of the riverbanks to the river itself.  It is coming to grips with the notion that I am and will always be the prodigal son, even though the first half of life was about establishing, trying, and being the elder son.  You know the son who did everything “right” and wouldn’t participate in the joyous banquet that his father had prepared.  Ouch.

Rounding second is painful but oh so joyful as well.  You begin to see beyond what you thought God, life, love, hardships, struggles are, and you move from “ego-centric” to “soul-centric.”  You begin to see that Jesus was operating in the second half of life mindset.  Why else would Jesus suggest that both the elder son and the Pharisee in Luke’s Gospel (Lk 18:9-14) were missing the point when they were doing everything that they were told to do.

But that’s the thing; maybe it isn’t wrong as much as it isn’t fully realized yet in our lives, psyche, ego, and soul until we move into the next stage or base. It’s like a kaleidoscope, by the way, another one of my pastor’s images he would often use; the more you turn it, the more perspective you get.  You get a 3D image, an image your own two eyes can’t see without help from something, and in our life journey’s case, Someone else.

In the end, I will leave with this thought and final story.  As you can see, I am far from having any understanding of this whole God, life, journey thing.  But just because I find myself knowing less about God as I get older doesn’t mean I don’t know more.  Make sense out of that one.  And just because I don’t talk about Him more now doesn’t mean that He isn’t in my life now more than ever.  So I will leave you with this.

For us Catholics, the real presence has something to do with this. When I was making the turn around first base in my life at eighteen, there were times that I wished I could sleep in the church.  It was the place that gave me ultimate comfort and peace. This feeling was present throughout my twenties and early thirties.  It wasn’t like I didn’t feel a presence outside of the church; it was just a place of ultimate security for me.  Today, the feeling of comfort and peace is still very much present in the church, especially in and through the sacraments, but there is a different presence that I yearn for outside of the church.  And it’s not so much a physical thing as it is a soulful thing.  It is more of a both/and thing.

Last week listening to the readings during Palm Sunday, the second reading from Paul to Philippians struck me in a completely different way from the first 150 times I have heard it and read it.  I heard it in a way for the first time as a man who is rounding second base.

“Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.”

-Phil 2:6-11

Stop grasping.  Stop trying to be perfect.  Stop trying.

God became flesh.  He did not grasp.  He became like me and you.  HE BECAME LIKE ME AND YOU.

Wait, what?

For the first half of my life, I lived as if the bad things in life were supposed to be uncommon.  It was a fantasy in which life was supposed to be squeaky clean, and if they weren’t, God was not a part of it.  Now when I see people caring for one another, holding a door, smiling at one another, and being just humane, I realize that God did walk among us. It’s simply the very thought that people can love one another that is a miracle indicating that God is present.  But it doesn’t stop there. It’s not just the acts of kindness that show the presence of the One who became one of us; it is also within the struggle, in the darkness, in the “sins.”  He became one of us to be with us as we are.  And guess what, that means in the filth, not the cleanliness.  The second half of life makes me wonder more and more about who this Guy really is?  The Guy who WANTS to be with me in that mess.

So finally, the second story to explain the point that I am having a terrible time trying to explain here.  I remember my pastor telling a story about a woman in his old parish who lived in the inner city and ran a daycare.  It was a small row home that many kids attended daily.  You can imagine the controlled chaos going on every day in that house.  Not to mention the noise!!  My pastor would often visit and be amazed at her ability to be calm in the midst of the daily toddler storm.  One day, as they talked about the recent news of a young mother from SC who drove her kids into a lake, drowning them (many of you might remember that tragic story), they asked how this could happen.  Well, this woman answered by saying, “Father, the miracle is that it doesn’t happen every day.”

We celebrate a miracle this week. A gift drenched in hope.  A miracle that gives us new life, especially the areas of our lives that we think are “not of God.”

We also celebrate our lives as being on the journey, a journey that is full of turns.  Turns that are scary, but turns that make life worth living.  Easter is all about redemptive suffering. It’s all about the beautiful struggle we call life. It’s all about making the turns.

Happy Easter to you, your loved ones, and your own journey around the bases.