by John Sexton
This story of Paul, arguably the second most important voice in the New Testament, is a story of revelation, not process. (As an aside, one of my political heroes, Adlai Stevenson—when asked what he thought of the statement by a prominent conservative Christian of his day, Norman Vincent Peale, that God would look favorably on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s election as president—famously said that in matters of theology he found Paul appealing and Peale appalling.)
Paul’s conversion occurs at Christianity’s dawn. Down through the centuries a multitude of conversions have occurred not in revelatory blasts of light but through difficult, lengthy processes involving diligent introspection—none better than a spiritual journey that began in North Africa centuries later.
In the fourth century, Augustine had a father who was pagan and worldly, and a mother (eventually Saint Monica) who spent more than thirty years trying to convert her son to Christianity. He resisted mightily, obtaining an excellent education, worldly success, and apparently a deserved reputation for what might charitably be called hedonism (among other evidence, there was a child out of wedlock). Eventually settled in Milan, he was influenced by another early Christian, Saint Ambrose, and by the writings of Paul. Persuaded in his head, he resisted changing his wild ways, agreeing with the faith’s tenets but still hooked on hedonism and famously pleading “not yet” to avoid changing. Finally converted, he spent the next forty years in the church hierarchy helping shape it and producing a mountain of prose that lasts to this day and rivals Paul’s in its advocacy of a simple, reverent life.
In the twentieth century, C. S. Lewis took a similar journey, as much of the head as of the heart and soul. A product of a comfortable, conventionally Anglican family in Belfast, Clive Staples Lewis at first rejected the religion of his childhood, moving as a well-educated, witty young man into a lifelong interest in folktales and fantasy fiction; for many years he was what we could call a practicing atheist. Quite vocal in his aggressive nonbelief, he observed once that he was “very angry at God for not existing.”
Lewis’s conversion, commencing around the age of thirty, came in two stages—to belief in a higher power and then to Christianity. The process, described extensively in Lewis’s books, was intriguingly self-analytical, bordering on the logical and surely not merely emotional. It was a continuous struggle, resulting (he once wrote) in the “most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.”
This great man’s spiritualism came in part from his growing appreciation of the transcendent forces around him in nature, in painting, sculpture, and music, and in encounters with others both directly and through reading. In particular, for an appreciation of a larger force at work, he leaned on the concept of the “numinous” (a supernatural presence) in the writings of Rudolf Otto, he of mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Through a reading of Otto and his own introspection, Lewis came to believe in God—the numinous, ineffable God described by Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The sense of the ineffable is a sense for transcendence, a sense for the allusiveness of reality to a super-rational meaning. The ineffable, then, is a synonym for hidden meaning rather than for absence of meaning. It stands for a dimension, which in the Bible is called glory, a dimension so real and sublime that it stuns our ability to adore it and fills us with awe rather than curiosity.” As Lewis, looking back, put it: “Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.”
The next step in Lewis’s conversion also was partly derivative. None of his relationships was closer or more intense than his long friendship with the fervently Catholic writer and fellow Oxford man J. R. R. Tolkien, who shared his devotion to folktales (how fitting that the two of them produced two of the most compelling and bestselling works of fantasy fiction ever in The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings). In the end, prompted by a long conversation after dinner one evening in 1931, Lewis became a Christian, remaining one until his death in 1963. As he wrote:
There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be “one with,” the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking—a paradox, and even a horror, which we may be easily lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.
If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. And if you do that, all else that is claimed by Christians becomes credible—that this Man, having been killed, was yet alive, and that His death, in some manner incomprehensible to human thought, has effected a real change in our relations to the “awful” and “righteous” Lord, and a change in our favour.
Suffusing Lewis’s work, in addition to the surpassing clarity of his self-analysis and deductive powers, is an eloquent sense of his struggles—toward faith and with it. “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy,” he wrote. “I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” Fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Boston Red Sox would murmur amen.
Tillich, another contemporary of Lewis, described the purpose of his own writing as “to convince some readers of the hidden power of faith within themselves and of the infinite significance of that to which faith is related.” Faith to Tillich is “the state of being ultimately concerned,” believing in “the promise of ultimate fulfillment,” and submitting to “the demand of total surrender to the subject of ultimate concern.”
The word concern describes the affective or motivational aspect of human experience; the word ultimate signifies that the concern must be of an unconditional, absolute, or unqualified character. The meaning of the term ultimate is to be found in a particular person’s experience rather than in some external reality. Tillich’s argument, therefore, is that the concerns of any individual can be ranked, and that if we probe deeply enough, we will discover the underlying concern that gives meaning and orientation to a person’s whole life. It is of this kind of experience, Tillich taught, that religions are made—and as a consequence, every person is endowed at his or her core with religion; what remains is the journey to discovery.
In Tillich’s well-known portrait Dynamics of Faith, he described how within a human being the rational and the nonrational coexist: “Man is able to decide for or against reason, he is able to create beyond reason or to destroy below reason…. Faith is not an act of any of his rational functions, as it is not an act of the unconscious, but it is an act [via conversion] in which both the rational and the nonrational elements of his being are transcended.”
Or as he wrote elsewhere, “Conversion is not a matter of prevailing arguments, but it is a matter of personal surrender,” a term also favored by Lewis.
Tillich and Lewis also found common ground—with each other as well as Eliade—in the deep meaning behind the concept of spiritual epiphany. “Faith as the embracing and centered act of the personality is ‘ecstatic.’ It transcends both the drives of the nonrational unconscious and the structures of the rational conscious,” Tillich wrote. “‘Ecstasy’ means ‘standing outside of oneself’—without ceasing to be oneself.” Lewis explained the experience in strikingly similar language, describing love as having the capacity to make humankind feel as though we are being “taken out of ourselves.”
Such blissful moments constitute the joyful, fulfilling life. Becoming attentive to them, seeking them, and experiencing hierophany and ecstasy can spur a change in faith just as easily as a sudden spiritual revelation in the classical sense. And anything of deep personal significance—often experiences suffused with the trappings of memory and bonds of love—can touch this dimension, the rhythms and patterns of art, music, and baseball included. “There are many communities of faith,” wrote Tillich, “not only in the religious realm but also in secular culture.�
� Sometimes, touching the transcendent requires a conversion.
Conversion is a serious matter, though it often is trivialized. Over centuries, conquered peoples have “converted” to the conqueror’s religion to stay alive. And no true conversion has occurred when one switches Protestant denominations to have an easier commute or to hang with some friends. And so also in baseball.
In the early fifties, Harry Leon Simpson was part of the first generation of African-American players in the major leagues, coming out of his native Georgia through the Negro Leagues and to the Cleveland Indians in 1951. He was a solid, nonspectacular professional in his eight seasons, though Casey Stengel once called him the best defensive right fielder he ever saw. Simpson tied for the league lead in triples twice, knocked in a hundred runs once, played in the World Series for the Yankees, and had a career batting average of .266.
But that’s not why he is remembered. In those eight years, he was traded no less than six times, toiling for the Indians, Kansas City, the Yankees, Kansas City again, the White Sox, Pittsburgh, and finally the White Sox again. His peripatetic life got confused with his nickname, Suitcase, though he actually got that after the character in a popular cartoon strip, Toonerville Trolley.
Suitcase Simpson played hard, but there is no evidence the venue ever mattered. No conversions occurred; he only wore the uniforms.
By contrast, when pitcher Babe Ruth was sold by the money-grubbing, debt-burdened Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, Ruth promptly not only became an outfielder but became the New York Yankee, defining for the future what being a Yankee means. Ruth’s famous nickname, the Sultan of Swat, according to several sources, first appeared in The New York Times almost at once after he joined his new team. It was not only intended to describe his hitting prowess but also was an alliterative reference to a remote part of present-day Pakistan that was once actually ruled by a sultan. Ruth became royalty; this was a conversion.
Any act of true conversion has at least two major components: dilemma and choice. As the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “At this crossroads where we cannot stop and wait because we are pushed forward by life—and obliged to adopt an attitude if we want to go on doing anything whatsoever—what are we going freely to decide?” Without attachment, he tells us, we cannot experience detachment.
A student in my class once asked Doris, “Given your experience and knowing what you know now, if it all played out again, would you want the Dodgers to remain in Brooklyn?” At first, the question struck me as ridiculous. Dodgers fans were devastated by the move, an open wound that more than half a century later still pains many in the borough and beyond. Indeed, an old joke in Brooklyn is that if you’re trapped in an elevator with Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley and your gun has only two bullets, what do you do? For Dodgers fans, the answer is clear: Shoot O’Malley twice.
But upon reflection, I realized that the question is profound. As did Doris, who considered the ripple effect. Assuredly, if the Dodgers had stayed, she would not have converted, and therefore she would not have forged the connection with her sons that the Red Sox delivered. The great memories of Red Sox Nation—celebrating dramatic October wins and mourning crushing defeats—would be wiped away. Then, the Dodgers themselves would be seen differently—as today’s team rather than as the special team that left (our team that left); for the leaving is part of what made New York’s golden age of baseball special.
After a long pause, Doris answered.
“No,” she said, with equal parts certitude and regret. Then, ever the historian, she added, “The nostalgia and memories are purer this way.”
The late Johnny Podres, the pitcher-hero of Game Seven of the 1955 World Series, made a similar point in an interview with Tom. Tom had asked why the tug of that Series’ memory remained so very strong.
“One thing you have to keep in mind is what happened that day can never happen again,” Podres replied. “There will be other great seventh games, already have been. Someday someone will pitch another perfect game in the Series, someone will make another unassisted triple play, someone will hit another home run to win it all in extra innings. But the Brooklyn Dodgers will never win another championship. They are gone. The events of that day are frozen forever.” Like Jeter’s records in the Yankee Stadium they now call “old.”
And so I say, in unison with my son: “Go Yanks!” With her boys, Doris shouts: “Go Sox!” And Tom exclaims: “Nice catch!”
We’ve all seen teams huddled together during tense moments, praying for a miracle. But those teams are not usually gathered on the side of a highway, their prayers led by a nun.
The story started simply enough. With the contest less than two hours away, we had pulled out of the parking lot of St. Brendan’s High School with just enough time to wade through Brooklyn’s notorious morning traffic and make it to Archbishop Molloy in Queens for the most important competition of the season.
It was 1961, my first year coaching the St. Brendan’s debate team, a role that became a central part of my life over the next fifteen years. We had piled into my 1955 Oldsmobile, known to the students for its worn and torn condition, and affectionately called Betsy. But as I turned onto the Belt Parkway, a cloud of smoke rose from beneath Betsy’s hood.
I made my way to examine the engine, glancing back only to notice that Sister Maria Dolorosa (sorrowful in Latin) was leading the girls in prayer, petitioning God to start the car. A few unsuccessful attempts at ignition later, and I, too, became convinced we needed help from a higher authority.
“Sister, you keep praying,” I said. “I’m going to get a mechanic.”
It was just a joke, but there is a way in which I meant it quite seriously. For me, prayers of petition have always been a futile exercise: “Prayer changes people, not things,” I taught my students when I was a professor of religion. The same can be said of miracles—one of the most nuanced notions in the study of religion. To some, a miracle is an answer to prayers—in effect a magic trick from above. But for serious students of religion, a miracle is a special kind of hierophany.
There are, of course, the miracles described in religious legend and myth: Moses parting the Red Sea, Lazarus reclaiming life, and Muhammad splitting the moon to name a few. And there are more personal miracles. But in whatever context it occurs, a miracle is a moment of deep inspiration, emerging from unlikely outcomes at the most crucial times, evoking ecstasy and electricity and awe. The Latin root miraculum means “object of wonder.” A miracle is another form of hierophany, a manifestation of the divine and a revelation of a wholly different plane.
But “false miracles” abound. Sometimes what appears to be a miracle is, in truth, quite ordinary, the product of coincidence (the rain dance followed by a storm) or even probability.
Probability? Ruma Falk, a professor emeritus of psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told a New York Times reporter once of the time she traveled to New York over the Rosh Hashanah holiday only to run into a friend from her Israeli neighborhood on a Manhattan street corner. Initially, she felt the encounter was remarkable; but then she recalled that basic statistics teaches that if you have a sufficiently large data set, it is highly probable that there will be specific cases of what might seem improbable. In other words, given the sheer number of visitors to New York from Jerusalem at any given time (especially over the Jewish High Holy Days), it would be more accurate to use the term miraculous to describe a day when two people from the same part of Jerusalem did not run into each other at a crowded New York intersection. It simply happened, this time, that the good professor was part of the particular pair that met.
By the same rule, though we find it amazing when we share a birthday with somebody else in a relatively small setting, the laws of probability establish that in a room of twenty-three people, there is actually a 50 percent chance that at least two were born on the same day; and in a gathering of fifty-seven people, the likelihood rises to 99 percent. Counterintuitive for most of us, yes; but st
atistically valid.
Even in baseball, the seemingly “miraculous” often can be explained. But as with religious believers, baseball fans sometimes find statistical and factual explanations less inspiring than the miracle itself.
In 1951, the New York Giants trailed the Brooklyn Dodgers by thirteen and a half games with only a month and a half remaining in the season, a seemingly insurmountable margin. But of their forty-four remaining games, the Giants won thirty-seven, tying the Dodgers and forcing a best-of-three-games playoff. The teams split the first two contests, ensuring that for the first time ever the National League pennant would be decided by the result of a single, winner-take-all playoff game.
As the last half of the last inning of that decisive game began, the Giants trailed 4–1, with their lone run the only one allowed by Dodger pitcher Don Newcombe over a twenty-three-and-two-thirds-inning stretch. But three of the Giants’ first four batters reached base, scoring a run and chasing Newcombe from the game. With two men on and one out, the score now 4–2, the Dodgers called upon righty Ralph Branca to face slugger Bobby Thomson, the hero of the first playoff game. Thomson would be followed, if necessary, by a young rookie in the on-deck circle. His name was Willie Mays.
What happened next is baseball lore, known to New Yorkers as the Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff (the Manhattan hilltop neighborhood where the Polo Grounds, home field of the Giants, then stood), and known more broadly as the Shot Heard ’Round the World (a phrase that traces back to a Ralph Waldo Emerson poem about the Revolutionary War, but since Branca and Thomson has been linked just as closely to baseball).
More than sixty years later, Thomson’s swing still ranks among the most celebrated in baseball history (Francis Ford Coppola used its broadcast in The Godfather, even though in real life the game took place a few years after the events of the film). With the count no balls and one strike, Branca delivered a fastball high and inside, and Thomson connected. The result was a hard line drive that left the infield in a hurry but then started losing speed as it carried into the outfield. When Dodgers left fielder Andy Pafko reached the wall 315 feet away, his glove raised high, it was not clear where the ball would land—until Pafko saw it disappear into the seats and into history, its whereabouts unknown to this day.