It's been a while since the last philosophical blither.

[kiya]

Posted to lilairen and to ravingtheosophy.

I was having a conversation (with Graydon; if you don't know who Graydon is, I couldn't possibly explain him, but for some people that may be meaningful context) in which it was suggested that the "more highly evolved" meme is itself something which evolved from the idea of being among the "saved". I happened to mention this to oneironaut in the context of a discussion of this article on introversion, which suffers a bit from the "membership in a persecuted minority proves our superiority" meme. (Which may itself be related to the notion of salvation, with the idea that heavenly reward shall come first to those who had a bad time of it on Earth.)

The resulting bits of flip conversation led me to a personal revelation about the applicability of baseball as a metaphor for interactions with the divine. Mind, baseball has been used as a metaphor for just about everything, but hey.

There are all sorts of ways of going at the metaphor; an easy one is God As Team Captain. This carries all of the gym class freighting, of course, of who gets picked first to be on the team, and who's left behind to be the dregs. (And who wouldn't be picked at all if there weren't the overriding presence of the gym teacher to insist that everyone should get to play.) But there are a lot of people who are quite certain that when everyone's lined up against the wall and people call out the names, they'll be right at the top of the list for God's second basemen.

If I ever encounter a door-to-door godbotherer, I'm going to have a hard time avoiding thinking of the whole situation as someone trying to recruit a bench player for the expanded roster. It's a good, solid bench, with those 144,000 extra quality players.

'Course, there's also looking at the context of the fandoms. I find looking at this sort of interesting, not because of differences of fandoms of different teams, but because of the different ways people respond to their particular loyalties. There are the stubborn, persistent ones; the ones who are very loud and enthusiastic when their team does well, and which fade into inaudibility when their team does poorly; there are the ones who shift loyalties depending on visible success. I now also wonder how many of the particularly vocal members of various religions are roughly equivalent of the boorish sports fans who harangue anyone who follows a different team, so long as their team is winning.

None of these were my revelation, but they're context for my revelation.

The other bit of context is that I tend to look at baseball as if it matters. Not so much as winning the World Series or something of the sort matters, but the game, it, itself.

I tend to have the gut feeling that treating the World Series as if it matters profoundly is a lot like treating the afterlife as something that matters in and of itself. The World Series isn't salvation; it's another set of games. The way one gets there is playing today's game well, and tomorrow's game well, and the game after that, and you don't know how many games you have to win to get there, so every day matters. That's why I think sometimes that baseball is a lot like life.

One of the things that I love about baseball is that it manages to be both an individual sport and a team sport. For the most part, the actions of each individual player are just that, individual, but success requires meshing those individual actions into a sequence, an interlocking of action and reaction.

Nothing is without context; fielding that grounder at third still requires getting the ball to first for the out. Nothing is without context; hitting that nice clean single still requires someone else being successful enough to get the runner home.

And now the last thread: Kemetic thought is largely focused on the concept of ma'at. Ma'at is many things, is justice, is social order, is correctness and correct behaviour. The netjeru live on ma'at; it is bread to them. (And while Dan cannot live on bread alone, in Egyptian practice 'bread' is the stand-in representation for food of all sorts.) And I've been reading Jan Assman's The Mind of Egypt on the recommendation of Rev. Jade, though I've been reading it very, very slowly; it's the sort of tome that I find I need to take breaks from after every page or two.

But there's one sentence that really caught me, and I've written comment on it elsewhere in the context of marriage: "Ma'at, then, is the principle that forms individuals into communities [. . .]."

The principle that forms individuals into communities.

The idea of ma'at is that there is the correct action for the individual, the correct action for the community, the correct action for the universe, and that all of these interlace on various levels. All of them are actions within their context, and reflect upon each other.

And now we're back to what I love about baseball, that sublime interaction of individual and group. Ma'at in baseball is knowledge of the context and taking correct response to it, working with those others, following the principles that organise into a baseball team. That is what the gods eat: playing the game well and with skill, and when mistakes happen, trying to correct them or compensate for them.

So I'd say: treating the game as if the primary thing is who gets picked is missing the point. Treating the game as if the postseason is the primary thing is also missing the point, though the postseason is nice if you can get there. The number of World Series rings is no more the best reason to pick a team than the cushiness of the berth in heaven is for picking a god.

The game's the thing. Playing as well as one can, and learning how to mesh with one's teammates into that sublime balance between the individual and the team. The appreciation of the arc of the fly ball or the sudden warp of the knuckler as a thing with its beauty and its place. The snap and rhythm of the double play, with its interactions of different people; the pitcher's art, the batter's skill.

There's community there. There's beauty there. There's the recognition of the efforts of individual entities and the recognition of their contribution to the whole. There's always tomorrow's game, and next year's season, and another game to play: whether on the diamonds of the Major Leagues or in someone's back yard, the kids taking on their parents on another sunny afternoon.


So, yeah, I believe in baseball.

And now up at bat and striking the ball for Hathor. . .

(Like theology, baseball can be simple, can be complex and intricate, and can be incredibly tedious to the uninterested.)

Addendum for this posted version only: I have a sudden and weird sort of wistfulness; the above post contains a joke that references my sophomore year of high school, and I don't know of anyone I knew from then who has a livejournal to read the sucker. Though thinking about it inspired me to write to my little brother Ben who is no relation to me, which I hadn't done in too long.