Yes, of course, as individuals and as distinct communities, we have our various religious and cultural mediations between time and eternity. All human culture, at least of the kind that emerges naturally over generations and epochs, is a structure of cyclic repetitions and returns, dramaturgical and narrative recapitulations of history and myth and the timeless origin of all things, interweaving and inflecting one another and drawing us out of the barren banality of mere sequential time. But I am talking not about individual Americans or discrete ethnic factions or elective affinities; rather, I mean America as a civic totality, and there the situation is either grave or ridiculous by turns. On the whole, religion inevitably fails in this country. We may have the greatest number of religious adherents, at least per capita, of any “developed” nation, but there is something about American culture that is relentlessly corrosive of genuinely spiritual values. Our indigenous forms of Christianity in particular are essentially shams and perversions, not only in the bizarre universe of white Evangelicalism, with its hospitality to blasphemous nationalism, diabolic militarism, and lunatic chiliasm, but also in many mainline Protestant denominations and increasingly in Catholic and Orthodox circles as well. America’s principal religion is America, and it tends to extinguish or subvert any rivals to its supremacy. One way or another, the myth of America insinuates itself into the sacred memories preserved in the faith and practices of Christian creeds and communities, and the sanguinary gods of patriotism manage to force their way into the company of Christ and the saints. Our civic pieties, moreover, are morasses of saccharine sentiment spiced with crass belligerence. Nationalism is, of course, a perennial temptation for Christians everywhere within the lands of Christendom. America is hardly unique in this regard. But here that temptation comes laden with all the ludicrous apocalypticism and messianism of America’s delusions regarding its own historical destiny. All is corrupted, all is idolatry. Only one institution stands out in public life that is more or less innocent of these evils but also capable of bearing the full weight of a people’s need for the sacred integration of personal, historical, mythic, and timeless memory: … baseball.
All right, perhaps I am, after all, indulging in hyperbole here. Love chafes at every restraint, and I truly love the game. But there is a certain serious moral point I am trying to make, all facetiousness aside. I do think that the displacement of baseball by the NFL at the center of American culture is indicative of a certain kind of spiritual sickness. In part, this is simply because it marks a movement away from the pastoral to the military in our shared imagination, and away from a lyrical celebration of grace and speed to a gladiatorial spectacle of physical prowess and brutality. It also, however, marks a turn away from dreams of eternity to ambitions with respect only to the terrestrial future. … How we dwell within time – whether as strangers and pilgrims seeking a better city or, instead, as partisans in a bloody war for the future – depends on what we choose to remember and how we cultivate that memory. To remember eternity and not merely the past, to remember God and not merely the call of destiny, is to be partially liberated from the brutality and idiocy of history. And, in its humble way, baseball really is a vehicle of reconciliation between simple recollection of the past and a transfiguring anamnesis of the eternal, experienced in the enchanted form of repeated cycles within repeated cycles, across an ever-widening expanse of years. The game really is a kind of civic liturgy, a kind of ritual repetition, that allows time to become transparent to the timeless. It cannot redeem souls, obviously, but even so it does have the power to aid in the redemption of the culture’s imagination and deepest longings. Or so I like to think. At the very least, it offers us a glimpse into paradise – into childhood’s innocence, into Eden, into what Nicholas of Cusa called the walled garden of the divine essence – all under the aspect of play; and that is a great blessing. Only in play, whether in sport or in art or in other “ahistorical” endeavors of that kind, can we really understand the true nature, the original peacefulness, and the final purpose of creation.