Calling On Angels

Al Kaline at Briggs Stadium, 1957

I left my heart in two places (outside of home) in my hometown. The Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Woodward Ave., where I was baptized and confirmed in The Episcopal Church, remains. The other, gone since 2009, was old Briggs Stadium, ancestral turf of the Detroit Tigers, who baptized me into baseball.

Though my mother and godfather usually took me on weekends, my first game was on a weeknight. I was about six. Along with millions of boys and girls, I have an inner YouTube video of that first walk along a darkened passage toward a light-soaked space -- the long white lines, the emerald grass, the clay-red diamond after it had been raked and hosed down, just before determined figures in brilliant raiment would surge from the home dugout, scattering the dirt with their cleats.

Starring in my field of dreams were sluggers Al Kaline and Willie Horton, now in their 70s and still active in the front office. After my mother and I moved to Phoenix in 1967, when I was 12, I kept my Tigers by the tail by clipping box scores and taping them in a scrapbook. When they beat St. Louis in the 1968 World Series, my godfather, who worked at the Detroit Free Press, mailed me the cardboard mat the pressmen had used to make a plate for the front page the next morning. The headline shouted “WE WIN!” to a town that was already experiencing harbingers of last month’s bankruptcy.

In the late 1960s in Arizona, the diamondbacks’ only prey was mice, rabbits, and gophers. While in college, experiencing vocational foreshadowing, I rooted for the Padres. I never cottoned to Yankees or Mets during ten years in New York. But I was in old Yankee Stadium (brilliantly portrayed by old Briggs in the 2001 movie “61”) with Richard Nixon and his son-in-law David Eisenhower on July 4, 1983 when lefthander Dave Righetti pitched a no-hitter against Boston.

Many years later, Kathy and I took Eisenhower to the Big A. He looked around the house that Disney

John and Andy at the Big A, 2013

renovated and said, “I envy you living so close to a major league ballpark.” But I was a utility fan at best until something flipped a switch a few weeks before the end of the Angels’ unremarkable 2012 season. I couldn’t wait for opening day. I’ve already been to the ballpark eight times this year. Kathy graciously watches more games than she would prefer. I use an iPhone app to listen to play-by-play from all over the country.

I’ve resisted using my phone to research whether a sudden spike in childlike enthusiasm says something I should but don’t want to know about my aging brain. While I’ve also resisted Googling “Jesus and baseball,” I wonder about the theology behind all the things we love with innocent abandon – from sports and music and painting to bridge and quilting and fishing and reading and all the hobbies and avocations in between. In March David Ferguson wrote in The Onion, “Find the thing you’re most passionate about, then do it on nights and weekends for the rest of your life.” I suspect most of us indulge our non-remunerative passions not to escape reality but to reveal our true selves to others and even to ourselves.

As people of faith, do our greatest passions also signify something about our conceptions of the sacred? Think about Angels fans wearing Holy Spirit red while celebrating and (so far this season) mourning as one. Children have more fun at baseball than at football and basketball games, and that’s also a holy thing. Others have written more eloquently than I possibly can about the game’s intricacy, its sights and strangely comforting sounds, its history, symmetry, and beautiful displays of athleticism. I enjoy the fellowship in the stands and the comradeship among the players, their youthful quirks and superstitions. I love winning and having faith that we’ll eventually stop losing. Baseball is tidier than everyday life and doesn’t matter anywhere near as much – until it does, when it’s almost like heaven.

This post originally appeared in the Vaya Con Dios, the newsletter of St. John's Episcopal Church.

The Remembrance Of Them Is Grievous Unto Us

The Huffington Post (which has the best and most coverage of spirituality and religion of any mainstream publication) on the 350th anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer, which was yesterday. They used to say a properly educated newspaperman knew Greek mythology, Shakespeare, and the King James Bible. My newspaperwoman mother would add the prayer book, which she said taught her the glorious cadences of the English language (making May 2 the birthday of her composition professor). This bit of the General Confession is from the 1928 edition, which she gave me when I was confirmed on April 30, 1967 at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit.

The Peace Of Christ That All Understanding Passes

Mega megachurch angst reported today in Orange County. The Schuller family hopes to take part of the Crystal Cathedral congregation to a new church, while Saddleback Church is in the midst of a controversy sparked by this article in the Feb. 26 Orange County Register:

Abraham Meulenberg, a Saddleback pastor in charge of interfaith outreach, and Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at a mosque in Los Angeles, introduced King's Way as "a path to end the 1,400 years of misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians."

The men presented a document they co-authored outlining points of agreement between Islam and Christianity. The document affirms that Christians and Muslims believe in "one God" and share two central commandments: "love of God" and "love of neighbor." The document also commits both faiths to three goals: Making friends with one another, building peace and working on shared social service projects. The document quotes side-by-side verses from the Bible and the Koran to illustrate its claims.

"We agreed we wouldn't try to evangelize each other," said Turk. "We'd witness to each other but it would be out of 'Love Thy Neighbor,' not focused on conversion."

The Register follows up today:

An outreach effort to Muslims initiated by Saddleback Church in Lake Forest has sparked a national uproar among evangelical Christians, with some accusing the Rev. Rick Warren, Saddleback's pastor, of betraying core Christian principles and Warren responding that his beliefs and intentions have been misrepresented.

Since an Orange County Register article published Feb. 26 detailed the outreach effort, evangelicals across the country have taken to blogs, social media and Christian news outlets to debate whether and how Christians should forge relationships with people of other faiths.

Longtime critics of Warren have published lengthy online accusations that the influential pastor, who delivered the invocation at President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, has gone too far in seeking theological common ground with Muslims.

Warren's critics accuse him of sending cunning coded messages to Muslims in his inaugural prayer and of being more interested in feeding people, preventing HIV-AIDS infections, and promoting justice than bringing souls to Christ. It's an age-old, tiresome attack on faithful Christians who happen to be called to make life better for all those whom God loves.

Warren does dispute the assertion in the original Register article that he believed Christians and Muslims worshiped the same God. “We worship Jesus as God. Muslims don't,” he writes. “Our God is Jesus, not Allah." This is also a wearisome debate. If we insist, as Warren's critics do, that Muslims worship a different God, aren't we making the fantastic claim that there are more than one? It's a commonplace of interfaith dialogue that the Abrahamic faiths share historical and theological antecedents, especially the monotheistic God of Abraham, Issac, and Ishmael. Islam's critics are really saying that Muslims worship God the wrong way. Whenever tempted to think that may be true, I remind myself that I'd take a different view if I'd been born in Jordan to Muslim parents rather than in Detroit to a mother who happened to write the newsletter for the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. I proclaim Christ crucified and risen, but humbly enough, I hope, to allow for the diversity of God's infinite mind.

April Fools For Christ

On an Easter Sunday about 45 years ago, our little family was a little late for services at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Detroit. We found seats in a pew near the back, on the right near the aisle. The congregation was half a verse into "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today." As we reached for our hymnals, my English-born grandmother, Lily Sharley, sighed with pleasure and said, "I'm so glad we got here in time to sing this." It was a powerful moment for me, fixed in my memory and dreams; and this pew looks about right.

Kathy and I visited the cathedral Tuesday afternoon after I'd given a speech in nearby Dearborn to 300 funeral home managers. I received the invitation thanks to my musical buddy Gary "Boom" Baker, whom I've known since he assisted with President and Mrs. Nixon's funerals, which I oversaw in 1994 and 1993 as director of the Nixon library. Gary's now an executive of SCI, owner of over 2,000 funeral homes and cemeteries.

The funeral business is worried about losing customers, the mainline church about losing congregants. One brand-new solution we fixed on is good, old pastorship. The two keynoters at the SCI conference, celebrant trainer Glenda Stansbury and I, found ourselves in a degree of friendly opposition. She travels around the country training laypeople and the occasional atheist to celebrate and preach at funerals because, these days, many family member of decedents distrust the church, don't believe in God, or just assume we'll do a poor job. In my remarks, I said the church had better not be too willing to cede that ground.

Our hosts asked me to tell Kathy's and my Nixon funeral stories (you try getting Henry Kissinger to stay within five minutes for a eulogy sometime, plus there was that moment with G. Gordon Liddy) before talking about funeral ministry. It was a chance to really unwind, since they gave me an hour and 15 minutes (which will alarm the people of St. John's). As Episcopalians will, I mentioned the priesthood conferred on all Christians by baptism. Arriving at St. Paul's on Woodward Ave. a few hours later (not far from the Fox Theater, where my homey Eminem arrived in that fine new Chrysler in his Super Bowl ad), Kathy and I were warmly greeted by a genial man on his way to the parking lot. I announced a little boisterously that on April 1 I'd celebrated the 50th anniversary of my baptism at St. Paul's. He replied that he was the Very Rev. Scott Hunter, installed as dean of St. Paul's four years ago, also on April 1. Couple of April Fools for Christ, the dean and I.

Ashes To Ashes, Finally

I kept them in my old 1928 Book of Common Prayer: Five crosses from Palm Sunday services I attended when I was a boy in Detroit during the 1960s.

My mother, Jean, gave me the leather-bound book, with its golf-leaf, onionskin pages, when I was confirmed in 1967. The crosses were pressed in the front, where she’d written her dedication. I’d finger them when I got the book down from the shelf to check an old prayer or service. They were dry but not as brittle as you might think, as though I’d put them there last year rather than during the Johnson administration.

Seeing them always made me think of going with my mother and grandparents to the Cathedral Church of St. Paul on Woodward Ave. On the way, we’d drive by the Vernor's ginger ale plant. Afterward we’d go to a diner for silver-dollar pancakes or the Art Institute for an egg salad sandwich and a peek at the famed Diego Rivera murals and an Egyptian mummy that was on display.

Every year at St. John’s Church, repeating the Altar Guild’s call to bring in last year’s crosses so we could burn them for Ash Wednesday, I’d feel a little guilty about my hoard of keepsakes.

But this year, driving to church on the morning of the last Sunday after the Epiphany, I thought about an Altar Guild member who was so eager to light the mighty pyre that she was coming to church in the throes of her recovery from surgery. I thought of my children or grandchildren finding the crosses on some occasion (far in the future, I trust) and wondering what to do with them. I realized that my memories were alive in my heart and spirit and that in any event my precious crosses, lent but not given, were a half-century overdue.

So I added my ancient crosses to our congregants' newer ones, to be formed into fateful black marks on a thousand foreheads Wednesday during four services at our Orange County Episcopal church and school. Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

If anyone says he's thirsty after Ash Wednesday service, I'll recommend he try a Vernor's.