Dear lovers of music, mystery, and meaning,
⚾ No one in our house is rooting for the Dodgers. Still, it was hard not to be captivated by Shohei Ohtani’s historic performance in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series on Friday: ten strikeouts (as a pitcher) and three home runs (as a batter), one of which literally left the park. It was, writes Peter Wehner, a remarkable, bright moment in an otherwise dark time.
“Because sport is gratuitous,” the ethicist Leon Kass once observed, “it is a field of grace: the gracious display of beautiful form, the gracious appreciation of worthy opponents, gratitude for native gifts and efforts rewarded.” He added, “The fascination of sport lies in the moment of truth, when some rise and some fall, some perform and some choke. Here in microcosm, the human drama is on display, with all its pathos and possibility.”
“A Truly Awesome Performance” (gift article) by Peter Wehner. The Atlantic.
🌱 I remained in a poetic baseball mood as the field of grace turned green in the beautiful baseball essay by A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind.” (If that last name sounds familiar, why, yes, he is the father of actor Paul Giamatti.)
It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.
⏳ To open our weekly staff meeting this week, I shared some insights from The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. This book really caught me by surprise this summer, but perhaps it shouldn’t have; it was the highest-rated book on my “to read” list. The book is filled with clarion calls to eliminate distractions and stress, so that we can truly be our spiritual selves.
For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.
John Ortberg, quoted in The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry.
Comer also wrote this a free PDF workbook called “How to Un-hurry,” which I shared with my staff colleagues. It serves as an excellent outline of the entire book.
Until next week,
-David