I recently took up watching baseball.
This was a disturbing development to not a few of my friends. I have made clear, through ample words and disdainful looks, that the wide world of sports holds no interest for me. When I find myself surrounded by suspicious fans who cannot believe any actual man would reject sports as a whole, I weakly offer up that I enjoy watching soccer. This compromise hardly satisfies Americans, but it works well as the sport is virtually never on, and no one wants to watch it anyway. A very few times this white lie has nearly been exposed; one particularly hair-raising incident involved a customs agent in Peru, where, much to my dismay, they actually know and love the sport. Fortunately I was able to feign incomprehension of his broken English, and he let me into the country anyway.
Why, then, baseball? To be perfectly frank, watching baseball is for me a spiritual discipline.
For the vast majority of Christians, “spiritual discipline” is a neatly, narrowly circumscribed realm which involves dusty and unpleasant but necessary activities. Necessary to what end? Well, here things get a touch fuzzy, but the general sense is that I will be better if I read my Bible than if I do not, even if I do not understand what I am reading. So millions of Christians have “quiet times” every day. More adventurous or “serious” believers might perhaps venture a fast, but this strikes many of us as odd and excessive. Prayer, also, is universally acknowledged as a vital spiritual discipline, the wide acceptance of which masks an almost equally wide sense of inadequacy in prayer.
Briefly put, the term “spiritual discipline” is, for most American Christians, as likely to cause a vague sense of guilt and unease as it is to bring any clarity to following Christ.
I want to suggest a simple re-imagining of spiritual disciplines. Dallas Willard defines disciplines as “any activity you undertake that allows you to do something you could not do directly by effort,” and this is good. I want to go one step further—a spiritual discipline, in the Christian sense, is an activity that helps you live, with your whole person, as if the Gospel is true—which you could not do by “trying harder.”
Christians believe we are forgiven of our sin; we believe we are adopted as sons and daughters of God. We affirm that God’s presence is with us always, caring and providing for us. But for the most part we do not live as if this is true. We live like we are on our own, and we are ready to grab control. And, unsurprisingly, the limitation of our control makes sin necessary, quickly.
Given a framework of vision that proclaims I am on my own and must provide for myself, I find myself unable to live out what I believe, because I do not really trust God’s presence. Having not seen it, I certainly don’t know it to be true.
A spiritual discipline works on the principle of what James Bryan Smith calls “indirection”—rather than directly forcing myself to behave as if I trust God, a discipline will steep me in the reality of God’s presence, love and forgiveness, so that my vision changes. And with the shift of vision—God is good! He is with me! He is my greatest joy!—comes a shift of heart, and then a shift of behavior follows.
That means that any activity or behavior that helps me experience God and His provision, and helps me retell my story accordingly, counts as a spiritual discipline.
Hence baseball. The reality is, my disdain for sports has to do with a messy combination of pride (ordinary men watch sports, while I read classic literature, which shows where I stand) and fear (I was never good at sports, or liked them as much as other guys seemed to, so perhaps I am deficient in some important way) and plain old defensiveness.
To set myself to watch a game of baseball requires me to revision. I am not, in fact, better than people who enjoy sports; they’re onto something I don’t see. I am not, in fact, less masculine than men whose lives center around sports, so I don’t have to hide a certain illiteracy about the whole topic.
Instead, I am a man created by God with certain passions and loves. These are good, and I am safe in owning them. Because God is pleased with me, I do not need to protect or maintain my differences; they are a part of me, and bring value to my community. Safe in this knowledge, I can step into a world foreign to me, look around with curiosity and find out what all the fuss is about.
Now, by no means do I have to think through all of that. But that is the reality I step into as I prayerfully choose to go against my inclinations, with my heart open to God teaching me.
Watching baseball is clearly not going to be this a spiritual discipline for everyone. But this kind of creativity is where spiritual disciplines become really life-giving. Identifying which practices will help us grow is not merely a matter of pulling down a dusty list and subjecting ourselves to them. Instead we discern, with trusted companions, where our habits and narratives don’t line up with the Gospel, and then come up with creative ways to combat lies with experiences of truth.
So, who knows. Maybe you need the spiritual discipline of keeping your house tidy. Or exercising regularly. Or the very spiritual discipline of napping. Or playing board games with your children and laughing together. Or doodling as prayer. Or tending a garden.
Nearly anything, rightly seen, can become a means of experiencing God’s true Gospel and learning to live in it every day.
As for me, I’ll keep rooting for the Giants.
