It’s trite but true: the one constant in life is change. Friends move away, hairs grow gray, stadiums are torn down. Change itself is not a problem, the Buddha said, it’s the reluctance to let things go that causes suffering in our lives.
Still, we carry with us traces of our youth, and there are times when we are simply 8 years old again, innocent of Buddhist philosophy, tugging brim of our hat to hide our face as we lose something we love.
Last night was such a time, as I watched the last game at Yankee Stadium.
Now, we all know about the Church of Baseball, we know the ties that bind baseball and faith (hope springs eternal and all that), and we know that Yankee Stadium was the site of three papal Masses, including the first in the continental U.S. (Apparently, popes do not like Queens.)
On top of that, I could mention all the praying I’ve done in Octobers past, sputtering imprecations on the Red Sox and begging a just God for mercy; I could talk about how Bob Sheppard, the stadium’s announcer, is known simply as “The Voice of God”; or how the monuments in center field look strangely like tombstones.
Or I could just say that baseball is religion in my family, with the Yankees as high priests (tell me that Joe Torre doesn’t look like a beneficent bishop), and the stadium as cathedral.
They’re building a new stadium across the street, but it won’t be the same. Like thousands of Catholics whose parish has closed, I’ll be forced to worship in a different space, which won’t be the place where I sat with my brothers and father and mother and uncles and cousins and wife and friends and listened to the litany of the lineup and the hymns: “Enter Sandman” and “New York, New York;” and shared signs of peace when things went well, and slumped in our seats when things turned funereal, and in the sea of interlocking “N”s and “Y”s felt moored in something larger than myself.
So, this is sentimental and maudlin, I know, and all things must pass, I know this, too. But even as we let things go, it’s hard not to lament, as even Yogi Berra, the Yankees’ own Zen master, allowed.
“It will always be in my heart, it will,” said Yogi, “I’m sorry to see it over, I tell you that.”
(Photo of Yogi by AFP)