Taking Jabberwocky to the Ballpark: Spiritual Dimensions of Secular Expressions
© Joe Price

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!

(from Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

For three reasons, I begin this presentation with these opening lines from Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” This fanciful poem has been called the most famous set of nonsensical lines in the English language. To me, their nonsensicality is important, first of all, because I want reflect on the way that nonsensical language prompted me to identify my academic calling and form of ministry. Secondly, I mention these words because they were a part of a choral composition by Frank Brown for a creative senior recital in which I had the honor to perform in the spring of 1970. And finally, this poem calls to mind Professor Ralph Curry, who allowed me to write my first major English paper on the “Mathematical Dimensions of Alice in Wonderland” since it bridged my rising interest in literature with mathematics, which had been my major during my first three semesters here at Georgetown.  

Most significantly, on an October evening in 1968, I attended a required “co-curricular” lecture here in the Chapel and heard John Killinger, then a professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School, deliver a lecture on Dadaist poetry that focused on how the literature’s seemingly nonsensical syllables revealed deep aesthetic sensitivity and religious sensibility. Using today’s concepts, we would probably identify the Dadaist poems as deconstructionistic ditties, as choruses of chaos, or simply as postmodern poems. Dadaist works reject received forms, they celebrate randomness and irrationality, they exemplify the absurd. How then could such luminal literature reveal not merely a spiritual yearning or need, but a spiritual core in itself? I wasn’t sure. But I knew I wanted to know more.

Professor Killinger’s lecture was illuminating and reorienting. The ideas hooked my interest and primed my enthusiasm for studying how secular literature, art, and rituals might manifest spiritual yearnings and perspectives. In short, the event proved to be a kind of academic conversion.

Following his lecture, I talked with Professor Killinger and asked him where I should go to graduate school to study the religious significance of secular literature. Simply, he said, if I were “serious”—which was academic code for the question, did I have the passion to persevere through a decade of graduate study—if I really were that “serious,” I should go to Chicago to study with Nathan Scott. Not knowing a thing about The University of Chicago or Nathan Scott, I decided immediately that that’s what I would do.
 
To begin to prepare for that study, I changed majors, shifting to English.  But I also took as many expansive courses as I could. In Alan Gragg’s philosophy classes, I encountered the ideas of H. H. Price, whose critiques of ideas about life after death provoked my thinking about Christian salvation and personal motivation. Reading Price’s reflections, I framed critical questions about personal motivations for becoming a Christian: Would the decision to follow Christ and accept him as “Savior” be made out of fear of hell, as had been often preached in revival sermons that I had heard? Or would it be made from a fear of death itself? Or could it be made out of a more altruistic desire to experience the fullness of life’s meaning even now by serving others. In Professor Gragg’s courses, I also began to explore the process philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, whose career had been shaped by his experience at The University of Chicago  In Hartshorne’s ideas, I engaged the possibilities of divine relativity and perfectibility, both of which respected radical transcendence and real human freedom.

In Harold Wakhing’s psychology classes, I first engaged the work of Paul Tillich, the theologian who has influenced my work more profoundly than any other. In the class on “Mental Hygiene,” which was a course about the philosophy of love, I read Tillich’s Love, Power, and Justice. I was riveted to his ideas about spirituality and how the divine could be explored in language that was consonant with biblical expressions but did not rely upon acceptance of traditional words, phrases, and concepts about God, Christ, sin, salvation, and such. I was hooked again, especially following graduation as I secured and read a copy of Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith as the first book on my summer reading list.

The initial notes in my copy are dated: July, 1971. Faith is more than belief, more profound and orienting than believing correctly. Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned. Faith is expressed most powerfully in symbols whose dynamic or tensive character can disclose—can reveal—the ineffable, the wholly other. That dog-eared, tattered copy of Tillich’s work, one of three copies that sits within arm’s reach on my study’s bookshelves, is the most re-read and frequently taught theological text in my library.

Having read Tillich to prepare for studying Religion and Literature at Chicago, I made a cautious decision. I took a three year pit stop in Louisville, where I filled my academic tank on as many topics as I could. I pursued my Master’s of Divinity degree at Southern Seminary in order to get a thorough grounding in biblical literature and theology. And I figured that being white and male and speaking with a thick Southern accent, I should get a Southern Baptist union card to make it possible for me to teach in a Baptist college, which would be my most likely audience, following the completion of my hoped-for graduate study at The University of Chicago, about which I still knew very little.

As a child and teenager, I didn’t think that had never really loved school or being a student, especially since I hated homework and tests. Then I had preferred playing baseball, listening to baseball games on the radio, or sorting baseball cards. But what began to happen in my courses here at Georgetown with Ralph Curry about the novel, with Alan Gragg about philosophy, and with Harold Wahking in existentialist psychology—what began to happen here is that I fell in love with learning. And a Southern that desire to inquire was nurtured. At Southern I experienced my M. Div. studies not as career training but as a liberal education in religious studies, and throughout my studies there—whether in learning Greek and Hebrew or taking required classes in Field Education or Worship, I sought to read through binocular lenses that were focused on Chicago. 

Yet in this short time together this afternoon, I want to do more than trace my academic transcript. As I turn from reflections about my own educational trek, let me share an extended anecdote that connects my Georgetown-found love of learning (and its strong lure toward religion and literature) with sports. While I was completing my studies in theology at Chicago (and that’s a forced conversion story for another occasion), my fellow Div School student Jamie Price returned to the University from Atlanta for his commencement. He had taught for a year at Georgia State University, where he initiated the program of religious studies as a sub-field within the department of philosophy. The chair of his department wanted to publicize the new program in religious studies and requested that Jamie organize a conference to bring attention to it. Late in the evening, Jamie and talked about what kind of conference would make a public splash. I suggested that since the two most widely read sections of the newspaper are the comics page and sports section, he should feature a conference on religion and sports, especially since Robert Short had already tossed his study of “Peanuts” to the comics-loving crowd. The conference could be geared to Atlanta, calling the sessions “Braves, Falcons, and Other Deities.”  At that point I drew inspiration again from my Georgetown days, recalling how the entire Tigers football team would huddle before kickoff at midfield, recite the Lord’s Prayer in unison, and conclude its doxology with a guttural chant: “Kill, kill, kill.” As I recalled those events, I wondered what had been the real prayer of the team. 

Needless to say, Jamie’s department chair thought he was filled with distilled spirits when he enthusiastically phoned after midnight to propose the topic. The conference never materialized in Atlanta.

Two years after my late evening musing with Jamie, I began to teach at Whittier College. There at a faculty sack lunch one day, Hilmi Ibrahim, a professor in sociology of recreation, asked me what course I would like to teach if I could teach “anything.” Without batting an eye—or swinging a bat, for that matter—I quipped, “Braves, Falcons, and Other Deities.” He said, “Great.” And he asked me to team teach the course with him the following January. Since he was on the curriculum committee, he promised to negotiate the course’s proposal and acceptance, and in the winter of 1984 we taught “Sport, Play, and Ritual,” for the first time. Now it is a course that I offer every other year.

That’s the story about how my yearning to study religion and literature—my attraction to the deeper issues of spirituality and secularity—led me to the study of religion and sports. Now as a sample of this vocational focus, let me read from the conclusion to the central chapter of my forthcoming book Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America.
 
 
For millions of Americans, baseball has exercised a centering power that has shaped their worldview. Repeatedly, pundits have sought to explain baseball’s “strangely powerful grip on the American psyche”[1] by considering its ability to provide escape, to exercise superiority, to pursue perfection, or to approach the sublime in its remarkable choreography. Reflecting on his own experience, Tom Stanton noted that “those who have never felt the sweet pull of baseball’s gravity struggle to understand its hold on us [devout fans].”[2] The identification of baseball’s power as the sweet pull of its gravity also suggests the rewarding and pleasant and character of its strength. Somewhat similarly, former Major League pitcher Jim Bouton said, “You spend a good part of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”[3] That reversal describes the character of faith as defined by Tillich, who specified that faith is the matter of being grasped by an ultimate concern. While one thinks that he or she might be groping for and clutching significant concerns, one discovers that the ultimate concern is so powerful, so overwhelming that it grasps one’s very being, empowering one to reach out for other significant concerns and causes. One does not adopt a new faith or give up one’s faith; instead, one’s faith is a matter of deep direction that cannot be easily or abruptly uprooted or rerouted. In simple terms, one’s faith shapes ones worldview. In the same way, being the faithful fan of a team, fervently wanting one’s team to win, “is an attitude that is not under direct voluntary control.” Personalizing matters in this regard, philosopher Thomas Senor suggests that a passionate fan consider the team that he or she typically roots against and then try to change, by sheer act of will, to become a fan of that team. The passions of fan allegiance, he concludes, are rooted so deeply in one’s experience and psyche that a decisive volitional act will not change one’s fervor, one’s faith. “You can decide now to act like a fan,” he avers.  “You can cheer and tell people you are pulling for them, but you can’t just choose to like them starting now.”[4]

As exemplars of other players and fans, Bouton and Stanton articulate the grasp that baseball exerts on themselves. The inexorable pull of baseball as a denomination or form of civil religion is revealed in this inversion of expectation: Rather than choosing to become a passionate fan, baseball itself reverses matters, gripping players and fans with fervor, enabling them to persevere through defeats and players’ strikes, and instilling hope for prolonging the game or season. In all of these ways baseball folds them into the heart of faith. “Baseball’s appeal,” Stanton concludes, isn’t complicated or confusing. It’s about the beauty of a game; it’s about heroes and family and friends; its about being part of something larger than yourself, about belonging; it’s about tradition—receiving it and passing it; and it’s about holding on to a bit of your childhood.[5]

As effective as Bouton and Stanton are in identifying the fundamental power of baseball to exercise a distinct form of faith, the summons to that faith is supplied best by an evangelistic character in W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe. Deleted from the film adaptation of the story is a vivid scene following Ray’s return to Iowa with both Moonlight Graham and J. D. Salinger.  One of the mystic players on the field of dreams and in the Kinsella’s home is Eddie Scissons, the oldest living member of Chicago Cubs’ World Series team who. Like Archie, he bridges past and present, playing with the old timers as the youthful version of himself while also interacting with the Kinsella’s as an aged sage. Standing atop the bleachers and “looking for all the world like an Old Testament prophet on the side of a mountain,” he delivers a sermon about the word of baseball, the word as baseball. Having elicited an accepting response from the Kinsellas, he proclaims, Can you imagine walking around with the very word of baseball enshrined inside you? Because the word of salvation is baseball. It gets inside you. Inside me. And the words I speak are spirit, are baseball.

At that point, W. P. Kinsella narrates, Eddie “shakes his head like a fundamentalist who can quote chapter and verse for every occasion.”  Eddie continues with his oration:
As you begin to speak the word of baseball, as you speak it to men and women, you are going to find that these men and women are going to be changed by that life-flow, by the loving word of baseball.

Whenever the word of baseball is brought upon the scene, something happens. You can’t go out under your own power, your own light, your own strength, and expect to accomplish what baseball can accomplish.

When believers then embody the word of baseball, they can speak its truth and hope because, as Eddie believes, “the word of baseball is spirit and it is life.”

Finally, Eddie testifies to the congregation of Kinsellas and the teams of old time players: “I’ve read the word, I’ve played it, I’ve digested it,” he insists. “[I]t’s in there!  When you speak, there is going to be a change in those around you. That is the living word of baseball.” The cure for the illnesses of the world or the answers to its anxieties will not to be found in the diagnoses of physicians or the prescriptions of their medicines. Instead, the cure, the answer, the hope is to be found in the word of baseball. “Praise the name of baseball,” Eddie concludes.
The word will set captives free. The word will open the eyes of the blind. The word will raise the dead. Have you the word of baseball living inside you? Has the word of baseball become part of you? Do you live it, play, digest it, forever? Let an old man tell you to make the word of baseball your life. Walk into the world and speak of baseball. Let the word flow through you like water, so that it may quicken the thirst of your fellow man.”[6]

For Ray, for sure, it is baseball that cures him, that sets him free—not only from the worries about making ends meet on the farm but from the guilt of severing ties with his father. It is baseball—with the field of dreams in the Iowa cornfield—that finally enables Ray to play catch with his catcher father, overcoming the alienation that had set in years before and experiencing the restoration of their filial bond. 

For true believers, then, the word of baseball is the gospel of an American civil religion that finds safety and wholeness—completion and salvation—where the game begins and where it ends: at home.