Baseball theology

There's no accounting for the twists of imagination, but it was probably the confluence of bible study material and baseball playoffs that got me thinking that maybe the existential question we all have to answer, whether we know it or not, is "who's your daddy?"

San Diego Padres Manager Bruce Bochy said he was hearing that from Cardinals fans before the Friars took the Redbirds to four games on the strength of great pitching by Chris Young and ageless relief by Trevor Hoffman. Clever denizens of the Gateway City were thinking sweep after the Cardinals won games one and two in the best-of-five format. Mindful of the fact that last year San Diego had in fact been swept by St. Louis in postseason play, Cardinals’ fans were phrasing the question as "Who's your Padre?" for obvious reasons.

That question looms larger than the average sports fan might expect. “What is the meaning of life?” and “why are we here?” get more ink among philosophers, but can both be thought of as satellites of “who’s your daddy?” In many ways, the whole of theology turns on the answer to that question, and the tie-in with Spanish usage by way of baseball makes it even more fun.

Anyone who’s ever seen a World War Two movie or learned a smattering of Spanish outside el juego de beisbol knows that West of the Rocky Mountains and throughout a considerable patch of land on both sides of the Rio Grande, “padre” is cultural shorthand for “Catholic priest.” Mi padre means "my father," and “mis padres,” my parents.

San Diego's major league team got its name from the city's roots in the eighteenth-century mission founded by Catholic missionaries like Junipero Serra, Juan Crespi and their brothers in the Order of Friars Minor, about 200 years after Balboa and his crew became the first Europeans to see the Pacific Ocean. Beyond the baseball diamond, Padre Nuestro translates to Our Father, meaning usually the Lord's Prayer but also God Himself.

Questions of paternity loom large all over. On the literary side of the ledger, the stage is crowded with a diverse group of fathers ranging from King Lear to Atticus Finch, Willy Loman, and The Great Santini. Moby Dick straddles the line between literature and theology, and if you know the history of Abrahamic faith or read the bible much, it’s tough to miss the significance of "Call me Ishmael." Melville was right to open his masterpiece with that, not least because “Call me Isaac” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Theology offers another way to scout the same territory, by pondering the gulf between Abba and Allah. That there is a gulf would be hard to deny, although as the pope was recently reminded, many people do try.

In brief (and if you’re a Christian, you already know this) Abba of the gospel became human, while Allah of the Koran did not. One God stoops from eternal majesty to let us call him “Daddy,” and the other does not.

Two different facets of the same deity, you say? I’m not convinced. While God’s ways are not our ways, trying to square the circle between Christian and Islamic theology seems impossible when neither camp abandons bedrock beliefs unless the end result is an almost wholly illusory “deity” who suffers from multiple personality disorder. Even among Christians, Jesus is the only reliable bridge between dangerously oversimplified views of God as wrathful and God as loving.

I said early on that some of this musing was provoked by baseball. Can you picture Jesus in the dugout, waiting to give us a high five when we ‘round the bases of this life to cross home plate? Unless I misunderstand the Koran as explained by Muslim thinkers themselves, if Mohammed is within a pop fly of that dugout, Allah has him selling non-alcoholic drinks at a concession stand where there are no Friar Franks, and you can’t get whatever they call the ballpark bratwurst at Busch Stadium, either.

It’s not just different faiths that have different conceptions of God: progressives and conservatives in the same faith answer “who’s your daddy?” differently, too.

My parish subscribes to a pamphlet series called “Sunday by Sunday” that is published by the Minnesota-based Sisters of Saint Joseph of Carondelet. Each pamphlet includes a meditative essay and discussion questions based on the bible readings used in church every week. When last week we heard again the story from Genesis about the creation of woman, the pamphlet editor, perhaps in keeping with her promise to provide "up-to-date scripture interpretation," used a translation that substituted “Creator God” for “The Lord God” throughout. Moreover, she went on to say, “Creator God” cast a deep sleep on the “human” before building one of his ribs into a woman.

I’m sure Sister Joan Mitchell, the pamphlet editor, did not mean to imply a contrast between woman and human, but in her zeal to sweep the dust bunnies of “patriarchal language” from under the bed, she managed to hide the lordship of God, mar the poetry of translated language, and demean her own sex. Perhaps “who’s your daddy?” is a moot point in her world, because, after all, we really ought to credit mommy more.

There are people who think that way. Some of them, like Sister Joan, have multiple graduate degrees.

But from the cheap seats where I sit, it looks like they’ve forgotten the tenderness in Song of Songs, the psalmist’s words about birds of the field, and the way Jesus wept for his friend Lazarus before raising him to life again. When “Who’s your daddy?” is a question that theologians and liturgists do not want to face, then it’s time they fired up the organ for the Seventh-Inning Stretch and a rousing chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”