From the pastor

Sunday Morning Memories

October 19, 2003

We are inundated with autumnness. Football games. Marching bands. Geese migrating. Colorful trees surprising us at every bend. Harvest. Caramel apples. Winter flocking of the starlings. World series without the Cubs.

Ah the Cubs. I awoke today for the first time since Thursday morning not dreaming about the Cubs. The dream was the same three mornings in a row. It was near the end of the game, they were losing, and I had to watch them die and feel the agony all over again. But last night, by the mercy of God, I reverted back to my normal Saturday night nightmares of imagining that my sermon wasn’t ready. (As I write this, it occurs to me that my nightmares are all true: the Cubs never win it all—and my sermons are never ready when I go to bed Saturday night. Perhaps these are not nightmares, technically. Perhaps God is just bugging me in my sleep—or making fun of me.)

I’ve been trying to explain the theological meaning of "myth" to my Old Testament class. The Cubs are an example. When I use the word "myth," I am not referring of course to definitions 4 and 5 from the Random House dictionary: fictitious, invented story, false belief, existing without foundation. I am referring to those stories that employ historical fact, imagination, poetry, intuition, and wisdom. Myths never exactly happened—they always happen. They help us understand what has happened and what is happening. They shape was is happening and what will happen. They have an uncanny influence on the future, just as they have remarkable insight on what really happened in the past. Myths unassumingly give us our identity, our values, and our expectations. From our myths we are locked into mindsets of what is possible and what is impossible. Our myths create love and joy and tragedy. Our myths guide us as we discover our sexuality, as we fall in love, as we take up vocation, as we fail, as we succeed, as we go through death. The more technological, scientific oriented, and fact based our society becomes, the punier our myth often become. And with puny myths, we are too spiritually retarded to cope with real life. We need tons of pills and therapy instead. The Bible has many kinds of truth, and among those truths are its mythic truths: those stories and phrases that help us understand God, life, each other, and our deepest selves.

The Cubs are mythic in a biblical proportion. I fell in love with the Cubs when I was in kindergarten, the same year I fell in love with Kathy Miller. Kathy remains a faint amusement in my heart. But the Cubs burrowed in, took root, and took over. Their story is one of loss yet hope, pain yet joy, castaways yet heroes. They have no team mascot, yet appear to be haunted by an old goat. Wrigley Field is so old it is now back in fashion. And the myth is complex: we expect to lose AND we expect to win. This year, for about 3 days, even crusted Cub fans like myself forgot to expect to lose. But we shall never forget to hope. Next year…. ---Mike