Suppose your spiritual life was a basketball team. Who would be your starting five?

Let us love not in word or speech but in deed and truth. ~ 1 John 3:18

I really only love God as much as I love the person I love least. ~ Dorothy Day

Sports enthusiasts who especially favor the game of basketball know that there is a hypothetical question that gets asked in the company of other basketball aficionados. Namely, if you were going to form a basketball team, who would be the player—active, inactive, or presently sitting in the heavenly Hall of Fame—you would build your team around? And who would be the starting five on your team? And people would argue—sometimes just shy of fisticuffs and mayhem—who was the G.O.A.T.* and why they would build their team around this one player named Jordan or Jabbar or LeBron or Russell or a young Chamberlain or Magic or Bird and so on. And then they would proceed to quarrel and quibble and squabble and spit as they filled out the starting line-up of their personal dream team and announced it aloud for argument to lateral bobbleheads and groans and boos and thumbs down or for agreement to vertical bobbleheads and Amens and Now you’re talkin’ and a thumbs up or reaching across the table for high-fives.

Coming from a family that was not only artistic but athletic, one bequeathment baked into Miller biscuits—at least the ones fed to then-skinny me—was the natural use of sports as a metaphor for life. My spontaneous go-to analogies to help make sense of the game of life (see what I mean), tend to be sports metaphors. When my older brother and I eulogized our dad who had been a long-time youth coach, we both agreed that rather than being a big fan of home run sluggers that he displayed an unapologetic preferential option for sacrifice bunters who moved baserunners along by “giving themselves up” for the good of others—helping them to get home safely. I still remember my dad—a lover and former athlete of basketball, baseball, and football—saying that of all the sports, crew was the best and his rationale was that when it came to winners, you only knew schools or boats, never individuals. He’d say, “Name me one All-American rower (silence). You can’t. It’s just a shell and everyone working as one.” His philosophy of baseball or basketball or crew or just about any other sport—for good or ill—was a window through which we were taught about life and how to live it.

In this spirit, I’ve been pondering what are the constitutive elements—virtues, qualities, actions, or modes of being—I would choose for my starting five for the authentic spiritual life, and which of these would I build my Dream Team around.

The Most Valuable Player, the center around whom I would build my spiritual squad, unequivocally would be LOVE. Radical, unconditional, color-outside-the-lines, no holds barred, deep and wide, break your heart open kind of love that got Jesus quite a following made-up largely of Elvis impersonators, blue-haired ladies, left-handed shortstops, and those labeled the outlaws, nerds, ugly ducklings, illegal aliens, runaways, throw aways, split infinitives, dangling modifiers, benchwarmers, stray dogs, alley cats, wounded birds, bottom fish, and fish out of water of first-century Palestine—oh, and the kind of love that got him killed, pinned to a cross for all passersby to see like a gold-starred homework assignment from Art class stapled to the large bulletin board in Mrs. Sullivan’s 3rd Grade class at Via Dolorosa Elementary School on Parent-Teacher Night.

Amidst its many foibles and flaws, the greatest failure, in my opinion, of the Christian community over two millennia is simply that it (i.e. we) failed too often to keep faith with and to communicate in word and deed the truth that love is at the heart of the Jesus story—which is to say the God story and the Christ story and the universe story and the human story are all integral parts of one story and it is unabashedly a love story.

We lost sight of the fact (because we turned our back thinking this would excuse us) that love is at the center of the reign of God, and the reign of God is what Jesus came to announce and reveal and draw us into like a mother hen pulling close her chicks; and that extravagant love is at the core of the daily living out of the Christ-life.

To put an anthropomorphic spin on it, my humble, calculated guess is that if we are asked one question when we round the bend for HOME (how optimistic of me), walk the long red carpet that is rolled out for the last two blocks and arrive at the Pearly Gates, it will be: How deeply, tangibly, and generously did you love? That’s it. No True or False. No multiple choice. No doctrinal riddles to stump us. No qualifying footnotes. No addendums. No excuses. Just this one question. For, as St. Juan de la Cruz said, “Love is the measure” which in the original Spanish was something more like “the proof is in the pudding.”

The tragedy is that we have let the word love be hijacked by today’s marketers and merchandisers who have something to gain either by reducing it to cherubic cupids shooting spell-inducing, warm-fuzzy, heart-pointed arrows at the objects of their affection or by perverting it to or confusing it with self-gratifying lust. Worse yet are those in positions of influence who have almost succeeded in disassociating the Christ-life from the enactment of love in what they deem all the wrong places or extended to all the wrong kinds of people. So the tragedy comes to our door ringing our bell offering the concomitant challenge for anyone who takes the name of Christ: re-member yourselves to these truths and learn to understand,

• first, that the original creative act was an act of love, by Love, for the sake of love;
• second, that Jesus is the incarnation and compassionate face of Divine love;
• third, that we need to reclaim the intimate, dynamic, and inextricable connection between Jesus and prodigal, self-giving love (oh, the anathema of me ‘n Jesus spirituality or Jesus portrayed today waving an American flag or preaching the prosperity gospel or carrying an AR15 Assault Rifle or looking as buff as an MMA fighter); and
• fourth, that we are called to incarnate this love, to make it real and credible and transformative by the undeniable way in which it is daily embodied by us in small or large but not-so-random acts of kindness and generosity and hospitality and compassion.

In her autobiography The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day wrote of the Catholic Worker Movement she and Peter Maurin started during the Depression in the bowery of New York City. Her community—of which there are some 187 incarnations today throughout the world—fed, clothed, and sheltered the destitute, the anawim, so dear to the heart of God who—year after year, decade after decade—are sadly and unnecessarily the poor who will always be with us it seems. I quote the entirety of the famous Postscript to her autobiography

We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.

We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form, saying, “We need bread.” We could not say, “Go, be thou filled.” If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.

We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls expanded.

We were just sitting there talking and someone said, “Let’s all go live on a farm.”

It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not always easy to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.

The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.

The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone anymore.

But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been tried through fire.

We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is companionship.

We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.

For Christ-ones, Jesus is the Word of God (Verbum Dei). The first and final word. That word is life-giving, self-giving love (for the given to and the giver of). To say Jesus is the Word of God is to say Love is the word God speaks. Unlike us, the only word God speaks. From before time, God, in Her infinite wisdom, knew that humans are prone to empty words, that talk is cheap, that we can be all talk and no action. So, the Ineffable One, gives us a word and the Word becomes flesh (because talk is cheap). And in this self-disclosive act of love in which the Word becomes flesh, we receive our nonviolent marching orders: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. Just as I have loved you, you must also love one another”  [emphasis mine] (John 13:34).

I humbly submit, that by the gratuitous love of God, we are here to fully, actively, and consciously participate in the divine life at the heart of which is the immediate, ongoing, and eternal exchange of love. We are here to cooperate with Spirit to make the dream of God come true “on earth as it is in heaven” by consciously incarnating love. And we are here to cooperate with the dream of the earth which is naturally, dynamically, and integrally tied to the vision of Creator Spirit and animated by the Spirit.

How do we do this? How do we rescue and liberate the love that liberates us and all of creation from its cultural captivity, corruption, and cheapening today? Mind you, I’m sitting in the front pew when I write this:

• (1) Make the Word Flesh. And, the word is Love. We are here to serve Love.
• (2) Follow John of the Cross’ counsel: “Where there is no love, put love, and you will find love” or “and love will be present there.”
• (3) Think small, act large. Meaning: there is no moment or situation too small to enact love by thought, word, gesture, or deed. The best moment to enact love is the present moment.
• (4) In order to avoid sleepwalking through life, shrink a month down to a week and a week down to a day and a day down to hours. At night before falling asleep do a brief mindful examen of your day asking, “When today—in thought, word, or action—did I give love, live love? When did I receive love? When did I fail to love?

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard writes: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”

to be continued. . .

* G.O.A.T. stands for the greatest of all time.

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