By Scott Dickison
I endured a bittersweet moment recently as I walked with my 2-year-old son through a critical rite of passage.
We are, as Dickisons, devout (I use this term reverently and deliberately) fans of the Chicago Cubs. This identity is not left to be passively soaked, but is formally imparted, and so my son began his catechesis this summer watching the Cubs on their magical ride through the playoffs. That is, until this ride ended abruptly as the New York Mets finished off our beloved Cubbies in a four game sweep, which somehow felt even shorter.
We were sitting in the living room the following evening after the Cubs had been knocked out and, in between jumps from the coffee table to the couch (his favorite pastime at the moment), my son asked me, “Daddy, where baseball game?” I looked at him in a way I imagine my father once looked at me and told him those words that every Cub fan learns at far too early an age: “Son, there’s no more baseball this season. We’ll have to wait ’til next year.”
If Cub fandom had a catechism, this is surely how it would start.
Q: What is the chief end of baseball?
A: To wait ’til next year.
I’ve joked, like many others, that cheering for the Cubs is character building: it teaches humility, humor, perspective, resiliency and, perhaps more than anything, hope. But I’m not entirely joking when I say this. These spiritual muscles can and should be trained by whatever means available.
It reminds me of what Kathleen Norris wrote in her beautiful memoir, Dakota, about how farmers in the Plains often speak of their beautiful but unforgiving homeland as “next year country.”
We hold on to hopes for next year every year in western Dakota, she writes: hoping for droughts that will end; hoping that our crops won’t be hailed out in the few rainstorms that come; hoping that it won’t be too windy on the day we harvest, blowing away five bushels an acre; hoping (usually against hope) that if we get a fair crop, we’ll be able to get a fair price for it. Sometimes survival is the only blessing that the terrifying angel of the Plains bestows. Still, there are those born and raised here who can’t imagine living anywhere else.
“This is next year country.” “Wait ’til next year.” There’s something truthful and deeply human about these sayings, with their ironic hope. It’s hard to even say them without at least a half-smile. And that’s how it should be with any hope worth having. It’s certainly how it is with the gospel.
I believe it was Frederick Buechner who said that depending on how you look at it, the gospel is a story that’s either terribly tragic, or utterly comical and we won’t really know which until the curtain falls.
If you look at the world and all the violence and war and injustice and chaos and you think this is all there is and the cycle can’t help but continue, human history and our individual lives are nothing short of tragic. But if you think that God must surely have something different in mind, and that, in the end “all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well,” then — well — you can laugh. Tragedy, Buechner says, is found in the inevitable: we’ve heard that story before, that’s just the way things are, etc. But comedy lies in the unforeseeable, the unexpected, the unplanned: the punch line out of left field, the clowns that keep coming out of the car, the Christ who just won’t stay in the tomb. Is it tragedy or comedy? It all depends on how you think the story ends. Will “next year” finally come, or won’t it?
You might say as Christians we’re called to be Next-Year People.
We’re called to be people who, despite all the bad news we see on TV and read online and live in our homes and carry in our spirits — hope (usually against hope) that good news is on the way. And not only that it’s on the way, but that from time to time we’ve seen it.
People who say that despite all our brokenness, something in us is whole. Despite our emptiness, we know what it’s like to be full. Despite the dullness we so often feel, we’ve still some saltiness left to give. And even though we know what it is to walk in shadows, we also know there’s light in this world because we’ve seen it, and — believe it or not — some of it is even in us. And more of it’s on the way.
“We’re Next-Year People,” we say with a half-smile. People holding onto the promise that the only thing truly inevitable in this world is the love of God.
That’s certainly something worth teaching your children, by whatever means available. And at least this Cub fan believes it’s a promise that’s as good on the North Side of Chicago as it is anywhere else.