Please bear patiently with a tad longer post this week. Sometimes, it takes time to get home.
I long for home and all that it represents, both to a child and to an adult. I understand, however, that for some the recollection of the hearth fire--it's inviting warmth and luminance--is quenched by disillusion. And yet, isn't this very disillusion testimony to the innate longing for home deep within the hearts of all?
Bart Giamatti--the late President of Yale University and, strangely enough, Commissioner of Major League Baseball--once reflected upon "home":
Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness, that cling to the word home and are absent from house or even my house. Home is a concept, not a place; it is a state of mind where self-definition starts; it is origins--the mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original, perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discrete, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate and it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it ever were to occur, would happen (Baseball As Narrative, A Great and Glorious Game, p. 99-100).
Consequently, gratefully, a sense of home is neither confined to the four walls of a house nor to the quality of our familial relationships. Where then might home be found? For the contemplative, a pilgrimage--a journey to a "sacred center," perhaps beyond to a distant place or within to a place that is true--can afford a sense of home, a sense of being. T.S. Eliot defined pilgrimage with a memorable verse:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
In the spring of 2000, my wife Kathy and I traveled to New York City to share dinner and a Broadway show with a client. The trip itself--only in hindsight, do I now understand--was the first leg of a lifelong pilgrimage to the distant, historic cathedrals of baseball that would ultimately find us in the Elysian Fields of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston--as well as the Bronx--and others in between. We began the week in New York state with a visit to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and spent our final evening watching a ball game pitting Cal Ripken's Baltimore Orioles against the home team at old Yankees Stadium, the House that Ruth Built.
Of the village of Cooperstown, mythical home and archive of baseball, historian Christopher Evans observed:
Particularly in Cooperstown, you feel close to the game's nineteenth-century roots. The town is not much more than a remote hamlet, set amid small green mountains at the tip of a long, narrow strip of lake. To call it otherworldy, out of time, Brigadoonish might seem extreme--except to anyone who has been there in summer. Then it would be almost too obvious to mention. It's a surprise to discover that the town's clocks actually move or that a Coke costs more than a nickel. You expect every local to be a farmer, tavernkeeper, or blacksmith (Baseball: An Illustrated History, p. 61).
The Hall of Fame itself, dedicated in 1939, to the casual observer, appears to be an imposing house of worship. Kathy and I approached the large doors of the museum and--much to my embarrassment--I began to quietly weep for the realization of this moment, this opportunity. I handed Kathy my wallet and--while I collected myself outside--Kathy stepped up to the box office in my stead and paid our admission.
I spent the day escorting Kathy among the innumerable artifacts of baseball's glorious past: Babe Ruth's overcoat; Ty Cobb's diary; Lou Gehrig's locker; Cy Young's pick-up; Jackie Robinson's uniform; a turnstile from Brooklyn's Ebbets Field; and more. I took Kathy by the hand and, with the excitement of a little boy, led her from one exhibit to another.
I shared with her the stories behind the artifacts: stories that were once just words on the pages of books I devoured in my youth; artifacts within my grasp that confirmed the veracity of those stories. Prior to Cooperstown, my legendary heroes existed only in black and white newsreels; Cooperstown offered evidence of their historical reality.
Kathy and I walked through the tunnel and on to the field of neighboring Abner Doubleday Field, the fabled--that is to say, not the factual--birthplace of baseball. It wasn't difficult to imagine layers of ghostly players from multiple eras, batting the ball, running to first, chasing a fly; men playing a boy's game.
On our pilgrimage to Cooperstown and in the years since, evidence of the authenticity of baseball's historic narrative somehow witnessed of the historicity of The Divine Narrative of scripture. Two narratives that, like all great literature, share the theme of coming "home," of reconciliation. Two narratives that live beyond the black and white newsreels of my imagination; two narratives that are living and true.
It was like sliding safely home. Booyah.
Where might you imagine yourself embarking on a pilgrimage? It can be, again, either beyond to a distant place or within to a place that is true.
Perhaps, unknowingly, you routinely take pilgrimages, but you were hitherto unaware of their significance. Is there a place to which you always return, either real or imagined?
What's the value that keeps beckoning your return to that place? What's there beneath the surface? How then might you choose to live powerfully and consciously from the place of that "sacred center," or the home, of your soul? |
