Zambian. Baseball.
This morning it poured rain during our 07:00 hours Mass in the mission church. It knocked hollow on the huge brick carcass of the structure the White Fathers had built in the 1920’s—which was now tumbling down and full of bats. They squeaked in the rafters as the readings were read.
Our community received a Salesian aspirant named Anthony two days ago. He had nearly paddled his way across Lake Bangweulu in a canoe to get here when the ferry from Chilubi Island (his home) had broken down. In the rain season, this can be very dangerous, so Fr. Cao had told him to wait. He arrived without incident on the bus.
After Mass, Brother Philip, Nate, Anthony, and I sat for a short meeting with the altar servers. They poked each other and laughed, and Nate gave them a talk on the profound holiness of the Mass. I gave an impromptu talk on John 13:34-35:
“I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.
This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Anthony translated for me. I told them simply: they needed to love each other. You can’t be a Christian if you don’t love. It’s an essential part of the experience. In fact, there’s no experience without it.
I taught them a good-old-fashioned St. Francis Parish School hymn: “They Will Know We Are Christians By Our Love”. It was a strange experience. The last time I sang that hymn, I had probably done so ironically. I don’t even think I believed in God when I graduated grade school.
I had a similar experience yesterday when it was my turn to choose a hymn to open Mass. I chose: “Make Me A Channel of Your Peace”. At St. Francis, we sang it almost every day at morning assembly. In those days, it was usually an opportunity for a joke: changing a lyric to something dirty, singing purposefully bad. Yesterday, it made me cry. My eyes strangled the tears before they dropped. Nobody noticed.
You cannot be a Christian without love. Here in Lufubu, as well as in America, many go through all the motions of Catholicism while forgetting this basic fact.
Two days ago, several Oratorians were arrested in connection with a brawl that occurred after a football match. One of them I knew—he and I had played football together with the kids. Last week he ate dinner at our house. The police raided the village at 02:00 and took them away. One of the guys they couldn’t find—so they arrested his younger brother instead. They have held them for days without seeing a judge.
On the day of the arrests, Fr. Hamwete went early in the morning to the jail. When they told him they were still processing the suspects, he returned several hours later. They refused to let him see them.
I heard that another friend of mine—who was out of town when the raid happened—also has a warrant out for his arrest. I’m not sure what will happen if he comes back. I’m not sure if he will come back. He’s supposed to be married in April. He invited Nate and I to his wedding.
Today, two days after the arrests, they’ve brawled again. Supporters of one team threw stones at the other. A tree was uprooted from the ground (likely from the graveyard, which directly borders the football pitch) and used to thrash someone. People stomped and kicked each other on the ground like animals.
All to support a Catholic football club.
You cannot be a Christian without love. I’ve had to remember this myself. Prayer doesn’t make you a saint, fasting doesn’t make you a saint, works of mercy don’t make you a saint. What makes you a Saint is Love. Self-giving, self-sacrificial love. Sometimes it costs you everything.
“If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing…”
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.“
After the altar server meeting, I went and had breakfast. When I returned to the church, Anthony had somehow become the leader of the Day of Recollection for the middle schoolers that we had learned was happening that very morning. We sang Christmas songs, prayed together, and the kids had Confession with Fr. Cao.
Afterwards, I distributed some sweets, and the girls got to work cooking the rice we had been given for lunch. In the Salesian residence is a mountain of Feed My Starving Children rice bags that we use in the preschool and at the Oratory. The girls—the oldest one among them being fourteen—got to work building a fire with plastic bags and broken tree branches. Soon they were boiling the water for the rice. The older boys played basketball, while the younger ones scrambled up into the top branches of the huge mango tree above the cook site, looking for the last fruits of the season.
Among the branches on the ground, I noticed a huge stick—almost the exact size and weight of a good hickory baseball bat. I picked up a mango and let it fly.
The girls noticed me doing this. They came by and asked for the bat. “We try?”
Soon, I was teaching a whole group of Zambian girls how to play baseball. We had a pile of underripe mangoes for balls, the thick stick for a bat, and broken bricks for bases. While half the girls kept the fire going with plastic bags and twigs, we smacked around the mangoes and ran bases in the tall grass. Soon, the boys from the basketball court were interested in our play, and we moved the game over to the flat ground near the volleyball court.
It was boys v. girls, no stealing, underhand mango pitch. In the first inning, with a runner on base, one of the girls hit a towering shot over the volleyball net. Home run. These were the only points they would score.
The boys got up to bat, and, late to the baseball tutorial, started off with small ball—grounders in the gaps and scrappy base running. By the third or fourth batter, they gained confidence, and started smacking the crap out of the ball. Their poor pitcher getting shelled, the girls pulled another from the bullpen. By the time the bleeding stopped, it was boys 3, girls 2. They managed to put us away on a strikeout and a quick play from the shortstop.
With the girls up to bat again, their leadoff hitter put a hard grounder through the 5-6 hole. The next batter smacked a hard line drive that took a skip before being stopped by the second baseman. The situation looking grim, I moved over to third base—and turned a double play to clear the field. The next batter hit a routine grounder to the short stop, and that was that.
The next inning, the slaughter continued, and the boys were quickly up 5-2. Just in time to save face, the girls announced that the rice was ready, and the kids scrambled away to eat.
It was an uncanny reminder of home. From the moment the kids sang “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” to the questions they asked me after lunch (“What is your family like? What is Chicago like?”), it was as if my troubles were forgotten, and those happy memories I once had were linked, through space and time, to the moments I occupied now.
Those seemingly random arrangements of peoples and places, those chance occurrences—were made present again. History is happenstance held together by the human heart. Love allows us to see meaning in the moments, order in the chaos. Love transforms absurdity into narrative.
I think more and more that God loves more wildly and passionately those who have hurt Him the most. St. Therese and I can have an argument about this in Heaven, but there is no fruit as sweet as love after forgiveness. I think every day about the ways in which I mocked Him, abused Him, ignored Him. Every day he floods me with inexplicable love. It’s absurd. Who acts like that? Divine Foolishness.
In proportion to the sin is the greatness of the Redemption. Part of me almost wishes, in a strange way, that I was worse, just so God could be even more glorified in me. If I could see St. Paul today, I would kiss him.
God is Glorious. The most hardened atheist cannot deny that. If He exists, if He truly exists as They say He does—then He is Glorious. The highest item in the metaphysics, as postulated, is the greatest item that exists. He is incomprehensibly good.
Yet, this is only half of the picture. This much gets you Judaism, or Islam, or late Platonism. Christianity stands on the absurd claim that GOD BECAME MAN. The mingling of created and uncreated reality without confusion. The irruption of the infinite into the finite. The excruciating claim that all of existence is primordially relational; that the ἀρχή at its center is “Person”—that the fabric of reality is love.
What would it be, if we pretended for just a moment, that it were all real? Aside from all doubt, aside from all legitimate lines of inquiry to the contrary. It would be…
Impossible. Too good to be true. And yet—we cannot escape its truth. It’s right there. It’s as if you somehow woke up and won the lottery every day for the rest of your life. “Impossible,” you might say, but your lived experience is right there in front of your eyes. You are holding the winning lottery ticket in your hands, brother.
Run the numbers ten thousand times—two plus two will always be four. God is inevitable. We would not exist to observe the contrary. Aside from God it is Chaos and Chaos and Chaos.
With God, it is too good to be true. Without God, it is too horrible to be false. Any other position tries to squeeze out a middle ground where it does not exist. I say: take your pick.
“Would that you were cold or hot… So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth…”