We get all worked up over the White Sox, and every autumn besides 2005, we end up wondering why the hell we did that to ourselves again.
Then we get all worked up over Ditka passing
away and forget there is still a football game to play. I was guilty, I figured
the Coach arriving in heaven might give the Bears a little divine timing
against the Packers.
Apparently, heaven doesn’t take requests
from the Bears’ front office.
The Packers beat the
living crap out of Iron Mike’s team on Sunday. How are all those assclowns who
have spent the last ten months chanting “Green Bay Sucks” feeling this morning?
That chant would sound a whole lot better if we occasionally gave them a reason
to believe it.
I’m not sure any of this bullshit matters
nearly as much as we let it.
Over the weekend, I added three more people
to my daily conference call to heaven. The list never gets shorter; it only
gets longer. Some mornings, I spend more time talking to people up there than I
do to people down here.
Now I have to put Pope Leo on the fucking
prayer list.
I got so carried away with having one of our
guys in the Vatican that I figured God might finally look favorably upon his
baseball and football teams. Meanwhile, Father Bob has to have some cancer
removed this week.
That puts a loss to the
Indians and an ass-kicking from the Packers in their proper places.
Our guy in the Vatican is still a guy. A
Southside guy who can get sick, fall down, and needs our prayers like anybody
else. We are so busy being proud of him that we can forget to worry about him.
But the more I think about it… nine innings of baseball, four quarters of
football, and five decades of a rosary have something in common.
Each gives us a reason to stop for a while
and to believe something good might happen. To share a little of our lives with
somebody else.
Sometimes we get a victory. Sometimes we get
our hearts broken. Sometimes we finish the prayer and still don’t understand a
damn thing.
Then we get up and keep moving.
There is another game,
another season and another morning when somebody needs us.
…And in my faith, there is a season beyond
all of this that never ends, Eternal life. I am counting on a pretty good crowd
when I get there.
So, let’s go, White Sox, let’s go, Bears,
and let’s go, Papa God.
Today is Columbus Day. I’m grateful for the
courage of people who took chances, crossed oceans, and risked their lives. The
road that brought us here was ugly in places, and we ought to be honest about
that.
When you order a steak, you are mostly
thinking about the plate when it lands in front of you, but somebody did the
work to get it there.
America came to us through the work,
courage, mistakes, and suffering of generations. Now it is our turn to take
care of what we’ve been handed and leave something better for our kids.
This morning’s chalkboard says, “Keep
moving forward, even if you have to crawl.”
After this weekend, crawling sounds about
right, but I’m still moving, still cheering, still praying.
Gusto, astonishment, and a prayer for
Leo.
