c. 2004 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C. Visit his Web site at http://www.onajourney.org.)

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. _ The University of North Carolina’s aquatic center is hot and sticky when we arrive at 7 a.m. Add piercing noise to that mix when competition begins at 8, plus several hundred hyped-up adolescent swimmers and their attendant hormones, and you have ideal conditions for human crankiness and craziness.

But our summer swim league is an anomaly. Kids get along. They cheer for each other. They cross the age, race and school lines that isolate kids in other settings. They congratulate winners, as if prowess mattered more than partisan fervor. They respect each other. When a swimmer gets disqualified for a poor turn, I see none of the glaring and blaming that are common when a shortstop misses a groundball in Little League.

Adults get along, too. When a referee makes a bad call on a false start, no one shrieks abuse at him. They comfort the girl who was disqualified. When swimmers’ times are odd, some wonder if the bridge shortening a 50-meter pool to 25 yards was placed correctly, but we leave it at wondering. Strangers work companionably as judges and timers. Those who work meets year-round do nothing to one-up summer-only parents.

Maybe all swim leagues are like this. Maybe swimming lends itself to healthy community. I just know that I am delighted to have my son be part of this team and league, and I enjoy serving as timer and judge.

Other venues aren’t like this. Our last experience in recreation-league baseball involved children who dished out verbal abuse against each other and a coach who heard none of it, perhaps because his son was the most abusive. Racial divisions and hostile parents ruined basketball for us. A friend tells of being dressed down by a YMCA official when he broke up a fistfight between two players, which referees and coaches were ignoring. He was told, “You know, basketball is just a contact sport. That’s how they learn. Get over it!”

Which is the anomaly? Is summer swim league the oddity, or hyper-critical baseball? Does the ragging of youth athletics prepare a child for the “real world?” Or are team spirit and mutual respect the real world?

I wonder if we accept less than is needful because we have lost sight of what could be. We tolerate poor service because we stopped expecting good service. We accept the denigration of persons in popular entertainment because we stopped imagining mutual respect, stopped thinking of all people as deserving dignity. We expect little from our politicians, shrug off their deceptions and public cursing, and, if we vote at all, choose among them with diminishing enthusiasm.

We aren’t surprised when a corporate executive is indicted, or when an athlete sneaks performance-enhancing drugs. We are surprised, on the other hand, when a public figure accepts responsibility for mistakes or an institution does the right thing for reasons other than threat of lawsuit.

Last week, many churches read about a Samaritan who assumed responsibility for a wounded man’s care, trusted an innkeeper with his money and promised to return _ behaviors that would be considered imprudent in our world, where few take responsibility, apologies are avoided lest they invite lawsuit, and care often seems measured in teaspoons.

The Samaritan seemed wildly extravagant. But what if he is the normal one? What if this is the way God made us to be, and everything else is anomalous? What if the Samaritan convicts the lawyer, not by being super-human, but by being normal, as God sees normal, and the lawyer is revealed as off-base?

In his parable of the Good Samaritan, you see, Jesus didn’t describe an exotic scene. He didn’t hold up the Samaritan as an impossibly high standard. He seemed to describe this as normal neighborliness. The anomaly was his being a Samaritan and caring for a Jew. But what he did was normal.

I don’t think I am alone in wanting to be part of such a world, where people assume responsibility for each other, trust each other, make promises that they will keep, and value compassion.

Why, then, do we put up with less and consider it normal?

DEA/MO END EHRICH