Where Heaven and Earth Touch (Bot9 #294)

Over the past year I’ve become quite the fan of Jordan Peterson. A pandemic tends to give you the kind of time you need to consume lectures over two hours long and books as prodigious in length as his. My lawn was in the shape it was in last spring and summer partly because I wanted to continue listening to his thoughts from his Biblical series. I’ve continued to listen and read here and there since then. On his podcast this week, Dr. Peterson engaged in a conversation where he talked, in part, about the space where “narrative and objective reality meet.”

That phrase got me thinking about John 1:1-4. There’s a beauty to those verses and the reason for the beauty had escaped me until Peterson’s phrase. Here are those verses:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

In the beginning, the formless, shapeless beginning, the Word existed with God and was God. All creation flowed from him. Life came from him. In the years shifting us from BC to AD, heaven and earth touched and Jesus is the manifestation of the moment. The narrative of the Old Testament met this world and Jesus entered our reality. It’s truly amazing. We talked about a David Crowder lyric from “How He Loves” during our small group this week - “And heaven meets earth like an unforeseen kiss.” It’s a beautiful, overwhelming picture of how much God loves us.

And, of course, all of this got me thinking about baseball (you didn’t???). In the span of my lifetime, I’ve seen this intersection of narrative and objective reality in baseball all but disappear. The beautiful narratives I grew up with through the great writers of the game once created an incredible mythology which made every visit to the ballpark all the more beautiful. There was a story being told bigger than every single game. Now it seems the game is simply a beautifully executed math problem led by younger men who resemble Matt Damon in Good Will Hunting.

I wonder if the ends of the curses at the beginning of the century contributed to this. The Curse of the Bambino, the Billy Goat Curse, and the Curse of the 1919 Black Sox all faded away with World Series victories by the Red Sox, Cubs, and White Sox. Add to the loss of those great narratives the advent of the Moneyball era, and we’ve lost the ability to recognize and engage in a greater story. The cherry on top might be the social media era where every player and story written desires to have the same level of attention as the next. The only problem is if every story is important, none of them are.

Mookie Betts leaving Boston deserved as much outrage as the riots at the Capitol building (well, in baseball circles maybe). But I didn’t hear it. We’ve lost the ability to grasp narrative which leaves us in a space of mere objective reality. There’s a need for both in our soul and our baseball lives. Let’s dive into some of the great baseball stories of the past and even write some of our own. The game needs it and so does our soul.