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We Have Had Our Run.
It Is Time to Leave.
“We have had our run. It is time to leave.”
Andy Pettitte, Pitcher for the New York Yankees
They had four related careers that impacted the baseball world for two decades. In the history of modern sports this was a rare achievement. In their late teens and early twenties, these young athletes began playing baseball together in the early 1990’s in the farm system of the New York Yankees. Among the four was a shortstop named Derek Jeter; a catcher, converted from being a second baseman, named Jorge Posada; a left-handed pitcher named Andy Pettitte, and a starting pitcher, who was converted first into an eighth inning specialist and then into the best closer in baseball’s history, named Mariano Rivera. These men slowly rose in the Yankee system until each became a baseball star in America’s major leagues. They were so good at what they did that all of them have a shot at election to the baseball Hall of Fame, with an all but guaranteed spot for both Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera. Together this quartet of athletes won eight divisional titles, made it to the World Series five times and became world champions of baseball four times. On the Yankee teams they were called “the core four.” Other great players came in and out of the Yankee system during their time, but this core remained the nucleus driving this team to spectacular achievements.
Finally and inevitably, age caught up with each of them. Jorge Posada developed injuries that hampered his ability to throw out base stealers, who in the last stages of his career ran on him almost at will. He finished his career in baseball not behind the plate, where he had presided for so many years, but as a designated hitter. Andy Pettitte actually retired and stayed out of baseball for a year before returning to win 16 more games in a Yankee uniform in 2012 and 2013 to bring his career victory total to 256. Mariano Rivera broke his leg shagging flies during a warm-up early in the 2012 season, which he had announced was to be his final year. After the broken leg, however, he said: “I do not want to go out this way,” and he vowed to recover and pitch one final season as the relief specialist without peer in 2013. He did just that and added 44 more saves to his all-time record. Derek Jeter played with a foot injury during most of the 2012 season, only to have his weakened ankle break in the play-off games for the American League title, which the Yankees proceeded to lose to the Detroit Tigers. Though he pledged to return in 2013 the ankle was slow healing and broke again in spring training. He would play in only 17 of this past season’s 162 games. Now he has plans to return in 2014 at age 39 for the last season of his contract. If he achieves that goal, and few people think it will be as a full-time player, he will be the last of the “core four” to exit the game to which they have given so much.
In many ways, baseball is a game, yet it mirrors life very closely. It was, as Andy Pettitte stated, “a great run,” but like all things it had to come to an end because life always moves on. These four will be referred to by baseball fans for their excellence in years to come. People will look back on this era as a great time in Yankee history, but all of these dominant stars will finally be replaced as a new generation rises and becomes their successors. That is just the way life is. In the words of hymn writer Isaac Watts: “Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons (and daughters) away.” We human beings live in time. We are born, we grow, we live, we die. Most of us are not remembered for very long. Inside our families the average time of our remembrance is about three generations. Outside our families we might be recalled once or twice in the twenty years after our deaths. Few of us will manage more than that. It matters not how much wealth we have accumulated, how much leadership we have offered, or even what positions of leadership we have held. The corporate memory for individuals is very short. How many people under forty, for example, recall that Walter Mondale was the vice president of the United States from 1976 – 1980, and the Democratic nominee for the presidency in the election of 1984? How many people can recall other members of the Yankee dynasty: Bernie Williams, Tino Martinez, Scott Brosius, Paul O’Neal, or Wade Boggs? Each was a great player in his own right, but each was soon replaced and quickly forgotten even though our memories are refreshed by Old Timers’ Day games. The ever-rolling stream moves on and obscurity awaits all of us.
Many people can identify with Andy Pettitte’s words: “We had a great run.” I am certainly one of them. When I survey my life I too can say: “It was a great run.” I loved the challenges of being a parish priest from 1955-1976 in such wonderful and diverse places as Durham and Tarboro, North Carolina; Lynchburg and Richmond, Virginia. I was deeply honored to have been chosen to serve as the bishop of Newark (Northern New Jersey) for 24 years from 1976-2000. I loved the tension of the issues that cascaded before us every day of those years: the struggle against cultural racism, the revision of the prayer book, the battles for the equality of women in both church and society, and the crusade for the dignity of and justice for gay and lesbian people. Then there were the international political struggles to which our generation had to respond. Those events included the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war, the hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan. We also lived through the violence and the tragedy of political assassinations, claiming such leaders and public figures as Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X, as well as the attempted assassination of George Wallace. We witnessed the civil rights movement and the anti-war draft-card burning movement. It has been a time of great transition and of great fear. Our generation had the great joy of watching a classical political struggle as an African-American senator man ran against a woman senator for the Democratic nomination for President. Their success as candidates signaled the death knell for both sexism and racism. No, neither is yet gone, but both have been mortally wounded. Subsequently we saw the election of that African-American twice to the presidency and watched as he invited that woman senator to be Secretary of State in his new administration. These symbols of transition in our consciousness were also reflected in my church when we elected a woman to be our primate and Presiding Bishop and an African-American priest to be the bishop of my home diocese of North Carolina. We watched still another prejudice begin to die as my church elected and consecrated two openly gay and partnered priests to be bishops. Yes, “our run” was exciting. As dynamic as it was, however, few people will recall for long the names of the major players in that drama, but all of us together bore our witness and we moved both church and society to new levels of sensitivity and inclusiveness. It was an exciting era. Life has been sweet, enriching, filled with the chance to bear witness to truth on new fronts. In our years at the center of our careers we were sustained by life-giving relationships with our partners, our children, our colleagues and even our opponents, who helped us clarify our thoughts and to increase our passion.
As we grow older we discover that the meaning of life is not counted just in victories won. Sometimes defeat is a necessary step toward a greater victory. Sometimes the witness is worthwhile even if the victory is never achieved. Sometimes the quality of love in the midst of an emotional struggle with opponents, who believe that they too are upholding God’s eternal rules, is the thing that is remembered, because that is the truth that makes the crucial difference.
Life moves on and battles change, but simultaneously perspectives deepen. Relationships pass issues in importance. Being loving becomes more important than being right. Seeing the larger picture, becomes more important than the day to day struggles as the tides of an inevitable, new and developing consciousness ebbs and flows before becoming established.
As the years go by, I look back on life with a different set of eyes. I give thanks for the opportunities my time in history has accorded me. I treasure those life companions with whom I was able to share the heights and depths of my generation’s struggles. I survey those sustaining relationships that have held me up when the battle was fiercest. Those are the things that finally give life its flavor, its meaning and even its intimations of immortality. That is when God is experienced not as “a being,” but as the “Ground of Being,” in which each of us is rooted.
Every living creature lives within the limits of mortality, but only human beings know it. Every life and every career has a beginning and an ending. Accepting that reality is what living life means. We must not spend our lives regretting that all things will come to an end. We rather are called to live our lives with robust commitment. We invest ourselves in the time that is ours. We have our run. We live in our time. We make our witness. We move our world into being more human, more compassionate, more just and more loving. It is when we act this way that we give life its ultimate meaning. No one of us will escape the limits of finitude, but by living life this way we will touch the depths of life that do transcend those limits. We will thus forge links between the past and the future. We will be investing our being in being itself.
That is the experience our religious language of the past has always sought to explore. Religious explanations are always both mythological and dated; they were never meant to be regarded as literal truths. The experience those symbols seek to explain, however, is always real and even eternal. Sometimes it takes a person like Andy Pettitte to articulate that reality in ordinary language. “We have had our run,” he said. All of us will say that sooner or later. If we have invested ourselves deeply in life and deeply in love we can and will greet the end of both career and life with joy and celebration. It is not a joy and celebration that our time has come to an end, but a joy and celebration that while we had our time we dared to live fully, to love wastefully and we found the courage to be all that we could be.
John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Larry Hawkins, author of "Tree Talk," writes:
Question:
I have just finished reading your book Eternal Life: A New Vision. I found it clarified on an intellectual basis many feelings I've had toward religion (specifically Christianity which was my childhood experience- although minimally), but was unable to articulate such. I grew up near Highlands, NC. I was in total agreement with your assessments and overall beliefs expressed in your book until I got to the end where you address life after death. I may have missed something. In response to the question of life after death, your response is “yes, yes, yes.” While the discussion is somewhat vague, if you truly believe in life after death in a heavenly setting, then I don’t get it. If what you mean to convey is by living a “good life in all regards would result in your life’s work/contributions continuing on after death,” then I get it. I would be interested in any clarification offered.
Answer:
Dear Larry,
Thank you for your letter. I understand the problem you articulate, but I do not know how to address it any better than I did in the book. The issue is that every word we speak or write is time-bound and time-warped. I am trying to point to an experience of transcendence that is beyond the ability of language to capture. No, I do not think life after death occurs in “some heavenly setting,” nor do I think it is simply how “my life’s contributions continue after my death.” It is easy for me to say what it is not, but difficult to find any words that can communicate what it is. Of course that leads some, perhaps many, to assume that there is nothing to describe and that is the problem. That point of view, to which you seem to give your assent, may turn out to be true, But I do not believe that that is correct. I think the question is far more open and profound than your words suggest.
My conclusions and my hopes are assisted in the fact that life has all kinds of dimensions that most of us never experience. Human beings are self-conscious creatures who are not bound by time and space. With our minds we can relive the past and anticipate the future. In our relationships, we can approach openness with another. In our worship, we can experience a mystical oneness with the Source of life and can step beyond our limits into what I call a universal consciousness. In those aspects of our lives, I believe we touch and experience something that is eternal. I call that something “God” and I see that as a dimension of life that is beyond all limits. I test this reality all the time and in all the ways that reality can be tested and still I think it is real.
I look at my world with all of its wonder and try to understand it. The world I inhabit, however, can only be perceived by living creatures and the level of the perception will vary with the level of consciousness in the perceiving creature. How much of reality does an insect perceive or a bird or a dog? Can a dog explain to an insect the dog’s experience of reality? Can a horse understand what a human being can perceive? Is there a perception beyond that of the human? Why, I wonder, do people assume that the human consciousness is the limit that consciousness has or can achieve? Is the there is nothing beyond human perception to which we might point but never embrace??
My conviction about the reality of life after death does not lead to a diminishment of this life as was so often true in Christian history. It rather leads me to live so fully, love so wastefully and be all that I can be so courageously that I can begin to touch the edges of reality and to glimpse what is beyond all of my limits. I think that glimpse is real; that is as far as I can go and as far as I want to go.
John Shelby Spong
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