Something Bigger

Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
-Colossians 3:3 

I have a friend who is a major St. Louis Cardinals fan.  When I say “fan,” keep in mind that it is shortened for “fanatic,” as in whoa, that dude is a fanatic or have you ever met someone as fanatical as he?  That’s the level of “fan” I’m talking about here.  He’s a devotee, a follower, an admirer of the Cardinals.

Apparently, he has difficulty functioning when baseball season comes around.  He goes to work and all that, but is constantly obsessed with the games and scores and players.  He’s told me about times when he couldn’t listen to the radio in the car because the day before the Cardinals lost and he couldn’t bear to hear the repeat of their failure over the airwaves.  Or how he meant to study for one of his classes but couldn’t because a game was on.  The other night I road with him for an hour in the car and counted 8 times that he checked the current game’s score on his phone.

One of the things about his fanaticism that I love is the way he identifies himself with the team.  He uses words like “we” and “our” and “us” when talking about them, like we played a good ball game last night or our manager in an interview said…   He connects with them so much that he talks as if he is a part of their team. 

I thought this was the strangest thing in the world, so I asked him about this once.  His reply was something along the lines of, Yeah, it’s my team.  We’re in it together.  He spoke of how at games, the entire stadium would stand as one when a good play was made, and he would be giving high-five’s to complete strangers sitting around him.  Everyone joined as one for this, their team, either celebrating or grieving depending upon their performance, rising and falling with the ins and the outs of the games and the lives of their players.  

So, in a sense, this friend “owns” the team and everything about it — not as a possession, but as a way of identifying himself with them.  Whatever they do, they do together, even with their greatest fanat –er, fans. He marks himself with the Cardinals team, connects himself with them, tags himself as a fan, labels himself, names himself, recognizes himself as the team does.  They win, he wins.  They lose, he loses.  They get injured, he feels the pain.  

We could talk about existential things like transcendence and how my friend is attaching himself to something bigger than him and about perhaps the society in which we live that has lost so much of the sacred that we used to be able to associate ourselves with.  But I think the most instructive thing in all of it is the nature of identifying with something.  There’s something sacred in it still.

It may be a sports team, a band, a business or professional organization, a school, a church, a religion, a whiskey bottle, a brand name, a family, a group of friends — all kinds of things.  The point in it is that we are made to live a life bigger than just us.

Maybe that’s what Rich Mullins meant when he said, “If I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, whom I claim to be my Savior and Lord…”  (This Jesus who is the greatest and most transcendent thing we can attach ourselves to.)  Then the best way to do that is to throw yourself into His life the way this man does the Cardinals’ life.  Fully.  Completely.  Immersed.  Associated with, labeled, named, tagged, linked, connected.  Adoring with the whole self, “in secret, between the shadow and the soul,” as Pablo Neruda had it:

“So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”