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Morning Meditation
October 15, 2025
"The Green Fields of the Mind" by A. Bartlett Giamatti (selected portions)
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. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.
Somehow, the summer seemed to slip by faster this time. Maybe it wasn't this summer, but all the summers that, in this my fortieth summer, slipped by so fast. There comes a time when every summer will have something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio--not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television--and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come…
But out here, on Sunday, October 2, where it rains all day, Dame Mutability never loses. She was in the crowd at Fenway yesterday, a gray day full of bluster and contradiction, when the Red Sox came up in the last of the ninth trailing Baltimore 8-5, while the Yankees, rain-delayed against Detroit, only needing to win one or have Boston lose one to win it all, sat in New York washing down cold cuts with beer and watching the Boston game.
Briles threw, Rice swung, and it was over. One pitch, a fly to center, and it stopped. Summer died in New England and like rain sliding off a roof, the crowd slipped out of Fenway, quickly, with only a steady murmur of concern for the drive ahead remaining of the roar. Mutability had turned the seasons and translated hope to memory once again. And, once again, she had used baseball, our best invention to stay change, to bring change on.
That is why it breaks my heart, that game--not because in New York they could win because Boston lost; in that, there is a rough justice, and a reminder to the Yankees of how slight and fragile are the circumstances that exalt one group of human beings over another. It breaks my heart because it was meant to, because it was meant to foster in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.
Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.
Meditation by Jeremy O’Neill
Upon reading the opening lines of this poem by the Professor, University President, and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti, it may seem like this text was chosen as a reaction to the recent fate of the Philadelphia Phillies or the relocation of the Oakland Athletics. But as much as I love baseball and its liturgical rhythms peppered with the unpredictable, the choice of this passage is about more than a pitcher making an error. It is about how we understand our relationship to time, to each other, to creation, and to God.
From the beginning, God creates cycles for the world. There is day and night, tides going in and out, and seasons marching on in an unbreakable rotation. God creates the world in six days and rests on the seventh as if to start the whole process again. Cycles and time are some of God’s first gifts to us. But even as these cycles abide, very little within them lasts forever.
This text was chosen because of how acutely we are aware of how the world is changing. Some of these changes are to be predicted, such as the leaves slowly accumulating in the churchyard, while others are more unique and thus more scary. All changes are consequential, and we must be careful not to fool ourselves into thinking we have built a life immune from the impacts of change.
We must also remember that God abides in the changes of the world. That does not make the suffering that can come with change null and void, but I do believe gives some cause for hope. It is Good News that resurrection is always possible, and in the waiting our rhythms and routines of worship and liturgy sustain us.
A crisp fall day may be a bit more reflective than a lazy summer afternoon, as the mortality of the year is beginning to set in. But like the most passionate of Baseball fans, to be a Christian is to live in hope for something better. Live in hope for something more. God is on the horizon of our repetivie yet hopeful lives, even as the darkness creeps in.
Prayers
Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light: Look favorably on your whole church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever, Amen.
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