Late on Friday night, May 17, 1996, my younger siblings were asleep in the room right below me. So, I couldn’t shout in celebration over the miracle that had just happened. Up in my attic bedroom, I was listening to Jon Miller describe an anxious moment live on WBAL from the other side of the Chesapeake Bay. The Baltimore Orioles were down by three runs in the bottom of the ninth. Bases were loaded, and there were two outs. In fact, the O’s unassuming catcher stood in the batter’s box with a full count. Three balls. Two strikes.
Chris Hoiles launched the next pitch over the outfield wall with what’s called an “ultimate grand slam.” Out of the 20,272 people who’ve ever played in Major League Baseball, Hoiles joined an exclusive club of just 32 players ever to hit an ultimate grand slam. You, like most people reading this, have probably never heard of him.
Almost every Little Leaguer has at some point in their life stood at a plate and imagined hitting a grand slam with their team down three runs with two outs in the bottom of the ninth. And Chris Hoiles had done just that. I looked around my empty bedroom. Are you kidding me!? Celebration upended my disbelief. Even as a high school senior, I felt an instant nostalgia. The air in my room felt electric as if lightning had struck through my radio.
A love lost
Later that season, the Orioles would utterly smash the team home run record set by the 1961 Yankees as seven of the Orioles’ nine starting line up players hit at least 20 home runs. All summer, there was hope in Baltimore and in the hearts of its fans—including mine. The first time in my life I ever dropped an F bomb came in my Christian college dorm room when I learned the Yankees had ended the Orioles’ magical run on the way to Derek Jeter’s first World Series title. I invested so much of my free time and attention in that Baltimore team in 1996. I knew almost every player on the Orioles’ roster and recognized when they were batting or pitching out of order. I wanted to be Brady Anderson, who rollerbladed to work from his downtown apartment.
At my college, we weren’t allowed to watch TV in the dorms; and I couldn’t listen to Orioles games on Florida radio stations a 1,000 miles away. Following the Orioles all but required trips to the library to look at USA Today box scores—assuming another broke college kid didn’t have the sports section at a table to follow their favorite team. During my college summers, I worked twelve-hour shifts in retail or sixteen-hour days as a camp counselor sequestered from the outside world. I didn’t have time for Orioles fandom.
The Orioles and I drifted apart.
Last week on the phone, my brother told me the Orioles were good this year. Apparently, they have a lot of young talent on rookie contracts; and that bodes well for the next couple of seasons. Timmy’s team review verified a headline I saw earlier in the season—a headline for a story I didn’t even take the time to read. While writing this post, I Googled the Orioles’ 2022 roster and didn’t recognize a single name. I couldn’t tell you which of the players were in the starting lineup let alone in which order. I didn’t disagree with a single choice the manager made this season because I didn’t care.
The opposite of love is not hate…
There’s a pervasive pushback in American culture, and particularly white evangelicalism, that those who critique our institutions hate them. I’ve read online the accusations that people like me who shine a spotlight on abuse in the church are agents of Satan. I’ve heard people (who own no more citizenship than I have) say that those who critique our American systems and cultures should move to another country. After another celebrity pastor is found with his hand up a skirt or after a textbook is found to include more than an Anglo-Saxon take on United States history, wagons are circled. Insecure adherents to a particular narrative or worldview become illusionists. They attempt to distract from their embarrassment by demonizing those who ask for remedy.
“If you don’t like it here, leave!” they say of patriots with different antidotes to society’s ills. “You’re hurting the Gospel,” they accuse people who make neither excuses for hypocrites nor shelters for wolves. They assume ripping Band-Aids® off to disinfect wounds is an act of ingratitude and that critique is necessarily hate. Those assumptions aren’t rooted in reality, though. As Austrian psychologist, Wilhelm Stekel, declared, “The opposite of love is not hate but indifference.”
The opposite of patriotism isn’t protest; it’s apathy.
The enemy of true belief isn’t skepticism but ambivalence.
Those who care but have different solutions aren’t traitors; they just love differently.
I find it ironic that those who doubt an opponent’s patriotism and loyalty don’t feel like their critique of government systems & policies disqualifies their love of country. And it’s wild to me that those who try to conceal the gross sins within the church don’t see hypocrisy as a Gospel issue.
A different end to the love story
Like fascists, jingoists, and nationalists, I love my country. But I love it enough to want it to be better for everyone, to represent better values. Having traveled to dozens of countries on all seven continents, I want to be prouder of our collective choices when I stand in other democratic republics. Like fundamentalists, evangelicals, and religious zealots, I love the church. I still think the Gospel is the hope of the world. I just want to remove all of what casts shadows on The Way, The Truth, and The Life—especially the darkness that keeps making headlines.
The protesters in Iran right now don’t hate Iran—just what Iran has become. They’d love a flourishing environment where freedom and equality wafted in the air they all breathe. Iranian women and those they’ve inspired dream of a place with liberty and justice for all. For me, “justice” means tov, the ancient Hebrew word God used over and over when he surveyed his pristine, yet-unfallen creation. I long for a country and a church where everyone is treated as though they were made in the image of God—because they were. I pray for a nation and religion where those who endanger the safety of women and children have boundaries placed around them to protect other potential victims from harm.
I know that’s a lot to ask. I know that’s a ridiculous goal, even in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But whether demagogues and their followers trust my heart or my motives, I’m going to keep dreaming for that ultimate grand slam. I no longer follow the Baltimore Orioles. Now I root for the pastors, journalists, and patriots who are speaking truth to power. I’m buoyed by their examples of shining light into the shadows of the things they love so others can eventually see something they love just as much.
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Photos purchased from iStockPhoto.com
