9/9
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| Still marching |
Roberto Clemente Night. Tonight Major League baseball honors Roberto Clemente. The first major Latin star in baseball. My childhood hero. To our group this morning, I wear his last hat, mustard and black. The hat he wore when he led the Pirates to the 1971 World Series victory over the Baltimore Orioles. That he wore when he got his 3000th hit against the New York Mets in his last at bat of hi slast season. New Year’s Day 1973 he would die when his plane went down taking relief supplies to Nicaragua after the earthquake. He wanted to go himself to ,make sure Somoza didn’t steal the supplies. Roberto said, “If you have an opportunity to help someone, and you don't, then you're wasting your life.”
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| Roberto's teams: Santurce, Puerto Rico (winter), Montreal (minors), Pirates (major leagues) |
Tonight al the Pirates will wear 21, the first time anyone on the team has worn it since 1972. Puerto Rican players throughout the league will wear it as well. And many of the recipients and nominees for the annual Clemente award. I have on a t-shirt with his 21 on the back and “I went to bat for the Great One” on the front. It was fundraiser for his statue to be unveiled at the 1994 All-Star game. (For which I was a volunteer.) I mention the shirt is 36 years old. Roberto presente.
Hope is on the agenda today. Joel talks about a new song they’ve written that Hot Glue & the Gun will premiere on their first show of the fall season tonight. Based in Amos. Noting there’s not a single positive oracle in Amos. Or Hosea for that matter. Both late prophets in the north. Words of doom. And hope? Well there are some tacked on at the end, Steve P believes they wee added for worship. Words of hope are needed to worship.
We do fall into a discussion of the eviction of the homeless people from the Upper West Side Hotels in response to complaining neighbors. Clyde responds angrily that the Coalition for the Homeless had raised over $100000 for the city to secure the hotel rooms. The mayor had dragged his feet from the start. And now just folds. Scandalous.
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| Wakanda Forever |
Someone wonders where the leaders are. Someone remembers when the complaint about Black Lives Matter was no leaders and they responded We are not leaderless, we are leaderful. Norm quotes the name of a book, There is no Messiah and you are it. And the question remains, how do we create a culture of welcoming? Is any moral requirement necessary beyond Love your neighbor?
Steve P has an article coming out in the Yale Divinity School journal on hope. For him, the key passage is Hebrews 11: 1. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. He talks about a time in Paris when he encountered the dark awareness of nothing. A sense of the power of nothingness. We're recall the (semi-) humorous statement There is nothing to fear. All spending on how you take the word nothing.) For Steve, hope is only hope if it is in what is not seen. What you see when you see nothing. It’s Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Every major Biblical character has a moment to face nothing. It is in the face of nothing that the juiciness of life can emerge.
There is nothing to be afraid of. Nothing is important. Very important, Steve P says.
Several of us are living outside of the city close enough to enjoy the wilds of Harriman State Park. Hills and mountains have histories too. It is a place where God hears.
In the face of nothing? Gratitiude. Community. Hope.
Steve takes us to Job. A folktale surrounded by poetry. A book of absolute hope. The inability of his “friends” even wife, to get it.
How Simone Weil said that an atheist who cared for others was closer to God than believers who don’t.
Which leads inevitably to the conversation about God and Satan, or Ha Satan, as he’s always called in Judaism. As in the Satan. Not so much enemies as frenemies, inextricably tied together. For writers like Jose Saramago, (in the Gospel According to Jesus Christ) working together. Ha Satan, the tester, the accuser, the prosecuting attorney. Joel brings up a series on Amazon Prime, Good Omens, that plays out that idea with humor.
And so there we are . On the edge with Stephen P. Feeling the power of nothing. And summoning hope. Like John Lewis on the Pettis Bridge, stepping forward with a vision of what could not (yet) be seen and in his endurance of blows over all the years, making it visible.
Steve H recommends a book White too Long for our reading.
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| Goodbye Cafeine |
On the Cafeine window, a thank you and goodbye note. Moving vans parked to load out the last remains of our coffee shop.
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