The God of the City, and Baseball

My dad and Chuck, his buddy from work, bought tickets to the first game played by the Pittsburgh Pirates at Three Rivers Stadium, held on July 16, 1970. Back in the days before computers, email, and smartphones--when dinosaurs still roamed the earth--my dad ordered the tickets, paying by paper check through the mail. I remember Dad coming home from work day after day, looking for his tickets in the mail. Disappointed, he'd have to phone Chuck to tell him they’d not yet been delivered. The tickets finally arrived in the afternoon mail on game day, too late for Dad and his friend to make the drive to Pittsburgh and attend the historic home opener.

For years, that unused ticket remained clipped to an old calendar which hung in the basement stairwell of my childhood home.

When I learned, several years ago, that Three Rivers Stadium was going to be demolished in order to build a new ballpark for the Pirates, I felt as though I was losing an old friend. I’d sat in the stands of that stadium for a number of games, sometimes with the youth group from my church; oftentimes with my dad and other family members.

I remember my mom bringing a picnic basket to the stadium, filled with Faygo Pop and  with cold Shake-and-Bake chicken she’d made the night before and wrapped in foil. Before coolers and backpacks were considered security threats at major sporting events, fans used to be allowed to bring outside food to games. Shake-and-Bake chicken never tasted so good as it did that summer afternoon while waiting for Willie Stargell and company to win one for the hometown crowd.

As a child, Three Rivers Stadium represented Dad and baseball; summer, foil-wrapped chicken, and everything good. I had no idea the ballpark was considered an ugly stadium, one plopped down onto a piece of land in Pittsburgh with little thought given to urban planning or how its location would affect those in the surrounding neighborhoods.

During the course of this year's Jubilee Conference I had the privilege of hearing David Greusel, the architect who designed PNC Park, describe the process he used in building a new home for the Pirate franchise. He spoke of walking the streets of Pittsburgh, taking in the city’s architecture, and getting a feel for the neighborhoods. He said he studied old photographs of Forbes Field, the ballpark which pre-dated Three Rivers Stadium, and incorporated design elements which reflected the history of the ball club. Greusel stood at ground level at the site of the new stadium, imagining the view fans would have of the city while watching the Pirates.

ESPNcolumnist Jim Caple described the stadium Greusel built in this way:

Frank Lloyd Wright designed his masterpiece, Falling Water, as a retreat-in-the-woods a couple hours outside Pittsburgh for department store owner Edgar Kauffman. Cantilevered over a waterfall, the home is both completely modern and thoroughly romantic, interacting harmoniously with the landscape by merging modern building materials with the natural elements surrounding it.

Falling Water is regarded as the perfect blend of art, architecture and environment.

Or at least it was until PNC Park opened.

Greusel described his work on PNC Park as a gift of love, reflecting his love for God and for the city of Pittsburgh. Having taken a wrong exit on my way to the conference, I found myself driving past PNC Park and through the neighborhood which surrounds it. The streets are clean and walkable; businesses surrounding the stadium are open and appear to be thriving. On game days, I'm told, those streets through which I drove take on the atmosphere of a community street fair.

I wish my dad had lived to see it.

There is no large banner draped from PNC Park which quotes the gospel message of John 3:16. Patrons of Pirate ballgames may or may not ever experience a life-transforming encounter with Jesus. But David Greusel designed a stadium which bears witness to a living God who cares about things like art, architecture, economics, and beauty. Greusel’s work reflects his faith in a God who is concerned about the welfare of the city, One who extends common grace to all.

The good folks of the CCO, sponsors of the Jubilee Conference, produced this video of David Greusel talking about how he connects his faith with his calling as an architect:

David Greusel - The Lie & The Love from Jubilee on Vimeo.

Linking my baseball playdate with Laura @ The Wellspring:

And with the Write it, Girl community:

Dancing Priest: A Review

Those who know me well know how much I detest exercise. The only way I am able to tolerate the daily climb onto my elliptical machine is if I can crank up some cheesy seventies music and open a good book. I am ever in search of a decent story to keep me distracted long enough to finish my workout.

I’m not interested in stories containing graphic and violent imagery that isn’t part of my everyday experience. Nor am I interested in what is typically offered in the name of Christian fiction; sweet tales of lost pets finding their way home on Christmas Eve after Grandpa finally gets saved. I just want to read a good story.

Dancing Priest by Glynn Young is a good story. And, trust me, in this story no lost pets come home on Christmas Eve.

Michael Kent, the central character in the book, is a university student in England preparing for ordination in the Anglican Church. He is also a bicyclist in training for the summer Olympics. He’s experienced loss in his life. He falls in love and likes Starbucks coffee.  In Michael Kent, Young has created a likeable character; one which seems real, the kind one might actually enjoy meeting in a Starbucks.

One of my favorite lines in the book is the question Michael asks after hearing of his assignment as a newly ordained priest. Michael asks, “By the way, archbishop, would the people at St. Anselm’s mind if I brought my bike?” Glynn Young has told a good story about an interesting, likeable and multi-dimensional man of faith.

Michael Kent’s faith is integral to his story, and I suppose some might decide to pass on a book containing strong Christian themes. I would encourage those readers to give Michael Kent a chance. Michael talks about his faith in a way which is both winsome and authentic. His character embodies what faithful Christian living might look like in the context of a young man navigating the world of career, calling, relationships, and a passion for biking. As a priest, and as a friend, he confronts the ugliness of brokenness and sin. His work dares to ask the question, “Can the gospel actually make a difference in the lives of those who bear deep wounds?”

Young, who among his other titles, serves as a contributing editor for The High Calling, an online network which encourages everyday conversations about life, work, and God. In Dancing Priest, Young offers a story which fleshes out ideas about the sacredness of all work.

I appreciated Young’s suggestion, in the words of one of his characters, that kingdom work doesn’t always take place in expected ways or places. Although Michael Kent’s desire is to serve in the African country of Malawi, it seems he might land a prestigious assignment within the church’s hierarchy. After learning the location of his first assignment, however, Michael’s archbishop offers him these words:

It will be better for you to be on the periphery than at the center because the center is rotting and collapsing. The future of the church is at the edges, and there you’ll find a willingness to abandon what’s dead, to meet the spiritual need . . .

That insight reminded me of the ministry of another, one who many expected to come and establish His kingdom by power and by force. He, instead, showed up and ministered to those in the fringes of society in backwater places like Bethlehem and Samaria.

There is only one thing I didn’t like about Dancing Priest, and it is this: After I finished the book, I realized I would have to wait until this summer to read the next in the series. How am I ever, until then, going to find the motivation to face my elliptical?

Dancing Priest is available in paperback and via download to Kindle.

Finding My Voice

“Finding your voice is your sacred obligation,” said the university president at the convocation service for the class of incoming freshmen.

I wanted to jump up out of my chair, clap my hands, and shout, “Glory, hallelujah, and amen!” Instead, I remained in my seat, tears streaming from my eyes as I whispered, “Thank you, Lord Jesus.”

From the days when I was filling out adoption paperwork, even before I met them and brought them home, my heart’s desire for my children was that they see God’s unique calling in their lives and pursue it. Throughout their childhoods, I prayed they would see their need for Jesus, respond in faith, and recognize they were created in His image for the good of the world and for His glory. We talked about these ideas, during our years of homeschooling. We revisited them as the high school years drew to a close and college applications and essays were being completed. Often my attempts to engage these thoughts were met with icy stares and stony silences. But now I know my son is at a place where he will continue to be challenged to pursue God’s call in his life.

Funny thing about raising kids, though. It’s hard to get them to latch onto ideas if they don’t see their parents and other influential adults putting them into practice.

Which I guess means I, too, need to be about the business of finding my voice. I have been trying, here in my little corner of internet world, to write about life and faith and how it all connects to the one big story of Jesus and redemption. I am willing to pursue that call, though my sentences are wordy and my verbs often passive. In that effort, I am grateful to have met many others who are using their voices for the good of the world and for God’s glory. So many of them challenge me to work harder, refine my skills, and write better.

This September, editors and members of The High Calling will be gathering for a writer’s retreat at Laity Lodge in Texas and are offering to pick up travel and registration expenses for one member of the community. These are people who understand the importance of daily work in the building of Christ's kingdom.  I would desperately love to be the person chosen.

Many other gifted friends like Sheila, Sandra, Lyla, and emily, are also hoping to snag that one lone spot. So even if I don’t win I figure I still win, because I’ll get to read more of their beautiful words written even more beautifully.

Go read their words. Then be about the business of finding your voice.

Flourish

She is all superlatives and rapture, you know.  Jane Austen, Persuasion

Flourish is a word I don’t often hear used in conversation.  The word brings to mind things like superlatives and rapture and people who use way too many exclamation points or dot their eyes with little hearts or something like that.  I hear the word flourish and picture people walking around wearing feather boas, for crying out loud.  Having lived in New England--the land of steady habits--for many years now, I’ve become used to hearing more practical terms:  persevere, maintain, manage, sustain, guard, defend.  I think I’ve grown cynical about the possibility of flourishing in life.

Maybe because the word sounds so foreign to my ears, I noticed how often it was used by speakers during the recent Jubilee conference.  Jubilee is a conversation about cultivating faithfulness in every area of life.  As speaker after speaker told stories about doing the work of building God’s kingdom, of working to repair and restore those things that are broken in this world, they kept returning to this idea of flourishing.  Work, as a friend often reminds me, is hard—which is one of the ways we distinguish it from all the other activities in our lives.  We do our work among thorns and thistles and stony ground that often refuses to yield fruit.  We do work in a broken, fallen world.

But these speakers, while acknowledging that work is hard, weren’t talking about things like persevering or maintaining or managing or sustaining.  They weren’t swapping stories about being trapped in cubicles or sorting through mind-numbing reports or juggling work deadlines and family responsibilities.

They were talking about flourishing.

Lisa Sharon Harper, one of the keynote speakers, used the word flourish in her presentation on the biblical concept of shalom.  Peace.  She asked us to close our eyes and imagine the world of Genesis 1, the world as God originally intended.  She asked us to imagine peace in relationships and beauty in creation and the fullness of oceans and skies that teemed and swarmed and flourished with an abundance of creatures.

Maybe flourishing seems such a foreign concept because it’s hard to imagine a world where it was once the norm.  We have conflict in our relationships, both at home and at work.  Ugliness has crept into our culture as pedestrian and pornographic images displace beautiful ones.  We hear that oil wells are spilling, that the polar ice cap is melting, and that the ocean’s temperature will rise and kill all the fish which once teemed and flourished in abundance.  We’ve become so far removed from what once was that we seek contentment in managing, maintaining, and guarding the brokenness of what is.

The Christian life, my pastor said recently, is not about managing sin.  He reminded us that Christ conquered sin and that, through Him, we participate in putting it to death in our lives.  We are no longer slaves who have to be content with muddling through the brokenness in our lives and in the world.  We are new creations, called and equipped to work toward peace and beauty and healing and the restoration of what once was and will be again.  We are free to find joy and satisfaction in our work as we participate in all things being made new.  We are free to express rapture and use exclamation points and superlatives.

We are free to flourish!

Now pardon me while I go look for my feather boa.

Linking with Jen and the sisterhood:

This Is It

When the Michael Jackson documentary This Is It was showing in theatres, a friend asked if I wanted to see it. I was more than a little embarrassed to admit that I did. My friend is active in directing high school theatre, so she had a quasi-legitimate excuse for wanting to see the movie with all its behind-the-scenes production footage. I didn’t really have a good reason; I’m just one of the multitudes of people who couldn’t get enough of Michael Jackson’s Thriller when it came out on MTV. And, I’m probably more interested than I should be or care to admit about the lives of celebrities. But I’m glad we went. It was a good movie—fun and entertaining, full of life and energy and artistry. But it was also a sad and tragic movie, and it made me think.

My friend and I met at the local multiplex one afternoon, having told absolutely no one of our plans. The movie opened with brief interviews of dancers auditioning for the opportunity to be a part of Michael’s show. They talked about how much Michael Jackson had inspired them. One gave credit to Michael for everything he had accomplished as a dancer. Several choked back tears, overwhelmed by and in awe of the opportunity they had to audition to dance with the one who had inspired them. These interviews had been conducted with the dancers prior to their auditions, before Michael had died.

Once the footage of Michael singing and dancing began, my friend leaned over and whispered, “And suddenly, we’re back in the eighties.” We sang along to the soundtrack from our college years, mustering every ounce of self-control we could to keep from getting up and dancing in the aisles. Had our teenage children been with us, I’m fairly certain they would have reached a new pinnacle of embarrassment. Before long, my friend whispered to me again, “He doesn’t look like he’s on death’s doorstep. He looks ... happy?”

He did look happy. He was singing and dancing and he was having fun. And, he had surrounded himself with enormously talented singers, musicians, and dancers and was challenging them to do and be their best. It was astonishing, seeing the number of times Michael Jackson stopped musicians because, in his head, he heard the music moving a beat faster, or a note being held half a second longer. He critiqued and revised movements, staging, and arrangements all based on the masterpiece he could see and hear in his imagination. And, oh, how he could move.

Michael Jackson was doing what he was put here on this earth to do. And then he died. And it was tragic.

The word tragedy has been watered down to the point that it is used to refer to almost any sad or distressing event. In its most classic sense, however, tragedy refers to a drama in which a noble character possesses a particular weakness that leads to his downfall or even his death. The tragedy of Michael Jackson’s life was not that he was an extremely talented man who died much too young. Rather, the tragedy of Michael Jackson’s life was that, although he was doing what he was put on this earth to do, he was unable to find peace and joy and contentment in so doing. Michael Jackson looked for those things in bizarre and harmful places--places which often made him an object of ridicule and, ultimately, led to his death.

I wonder about those dancers who looked to Michael Jackson as their source of inspiration for everything they hoped to do and be. I wonder where they now find meaning for their life’s work.

I think about my life and wonder if I’m doing what God put me here on this earth to do and if I’m inspiring others to do the same. I hear the words of the ancient Westminster divines asking, “What is man’s chief end?” And the answer comes, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever.” This is it.

I will never glorify God through song and dance; I’m neither wired nor gifted in that way—ask my kids who roll their eyes whenever I even threaten to break out into my mommy dance. As I look for ways to use the gifts and talents I have been given, however, may God give me the grace to pursue excellence and to find His peace, His joy, and His contentment in this life and forever.