Sacred & Profane

by Rob Goodale

I recently moved to a new apartment. The word “recently” is in this case, as it is in all cases, relative -- I have been living in this apartment for four and a half months. However, my fervor for settling into this new home sputtered after the clothes made their way into the closet and the dresser, and so a small colony of boxes took up residence in various corners of my bedroom, to be revisited at a later date.

Unpacking boxes of miscellany is, of course, a venture far more autumnal than estival. Also there is a towering, shadowy mountain of papers that need to be graded, and everyone knows there is nothing so good as a looming deadline to suddenly catch the spirit to do something utterly unrelated to said deadline. And so this past weekend I found myself in a fit of redirected productivity.

The box in question had hibernated for the summer beneath my desk, gathering a thin layer of dust which ossified the memories that lay within. When I finally dislodge the box from its resting place and place it upon my desk, a ritual of self-discovery begins. As I pick through the box, I unearth my collection of coozies, a few whiskey glasses, my baseball glove, and a couple of ziplock bags of pipe tobacco, all in the same box as icons, crucifixes, incense, and a statue of the Blessed Mother. This seems a sufficient summation of my personhood: sacred and profane, intermingled together and each pleased with the mixture.

This also seems sufficient to describe the way that Our Lord views creation: a brilliant interplay between the profane and the sacred, between that which is secular and that which is holy, between man and God, human and divine, creature and creator, until the eternal rubs off on the temporal and infuses it with divine life. This, after all, is how God creates: He assembles Adam from crude mud and clay, forming a great clump of hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and carbon. Then the Breath of God, the advocate which inspires the Earth, intertwines with the elemental until the two become one.

Creation obviously benefits from being imbued with the Divine Breath; life itself springs forth, and the Love outpoured elevates nature to unimaginable dignity. The Creator, apparently, benefits because He enjoys being with His creation. As if to double down on this reckless delight, the Love that holds the entire universe in being takes a human nature to himself, taking the form of a slave, born in human likeness and being found in human form. The great emptying of the Logos into humanity, a colossal mystery concealing The Colossal Mystery, clearly establishes the message: God likes things to be together, even (and perhaps especially) if it gets a bit messy.

Teilhard de Chardin said, “by virtue of creation, and still more the incarnation, nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.” I often find it tempting to sort the various items I find in boxes under my desk into rigid categories: virtues here, vices there, and so on. But to haphazardly toss any worldly pleasure into the “vices” bin is an oversimplification; it is my privilege and my responsibility to discover how to unpack the latent grace within baseball, whiskey, and tobacco.

There is no created thing that cannot be used to glorify God. Pick through the box of forgotten humanity, unearthing all that is sacred and profane. Should we encounter something so broken as to seem beyond value, it is our duty to thwart the work of the Great Separator, and return it to its proper place: next to the eternal.

In Appreciation of El Mago

by Rob Goodale

The wheel of time has spun round once more to that most favored time of year -- early autumn -- and with the waning days of the ninth month comes my most revered ritual -- writing about the Chicago Cubs. Apologies to the less baseball-inclined among you.¹

As the season wends its way toward its conclusion at the end of September, the Cubs cling to a slim division lead over the Milwaukee Brewers. The third best team in the National League is the St. Louis Cardinals, who are awful at everything and hated by everyone also in the Central Division. If you are like me (which, for your general wellness, I sincerely hope is not the case), the next few weeks are going to be harrowing.

It isn’t hard to imagine this season careening off a magnificent cliff, nor is it particularly difficult to envision a 2018 fandom rife with misery. The team has looked out of sorts all season. Our most beautiful sparkle-eyed MVP has missed almost half of the season with a mysterious shoulder injury. Our starting rotation is held together with roughly $38 million dollars worth of paper clips and chewed up bubble gum. Our big mid-season acquisition is a bat-first second baseman who apparently also tries to play second base with a bat instead of a glove.²

It could be a grim season. But reader, it is not, and there is one reason for that. That reason’s name is Ednel Javier Baez: human GIF, invader of dreams, and literal magician.

Javy Baez is the most valuable player, not only in the National League, but in my soul. He brings peerless exuberance and frivolity to every play, whether he be at second base, third base, or shortstop -- three positions he plays better than just about anyone alive. He hits colossal home runs and scores from first base on weakly-hit bloop singles. His mere presence on the basepaths reduces the opposition to high school JV teams who are going to start running laps as soon as they chase down all of the wild throws they’ve scattered around the edges of the field.

It would be a mis-characterization for me to say that the rest of the Cubs have been a black hole of despair this year. They haven’t been. All of my favorite players are still my favorite players -- but for most of the team, the season has felt a lot like C.S. Lewis’ grey town: dreary and twilit, rainy not quite raining, neither day nor night. It’s been a slog. I know I made a lot of these complaints last year, too. Maybe this is just what it feels like to be a fan of a good baseball team.

Javy is the antidote, man. In a way, I imagine that watching him play baseball is the tiniest bit like watching a saint live.



I don’t mean to say that Javy Baez will be canonized in the Roman Catholic Church for being able to hit a ball with a stick; I am merely remembering the way Lewis describes saints in Mere Christianity. “Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant,” he writes. “They begin where most of us leave off.”³

Javy plays like he’s the only one in on the secret: that it’s a children’s game, and he gets paid to play it. His reckless contagious unbridled disruptive magnetic joy is so dang fun to watch, I fell in love with him two years ago when he was only half this good.

Normally, when an athlete reaches that transcendent level of performance, it feels like a titanic feat. LeBron James, Tiger Woods: these men exerted their physical dominance with a grimace, and we give them more credit because we can see how hard they work. Javy is more buoyant, taking himself more lightly, than anyone else I’ve ever seen play professional sports, and his joy makes me want to live the way he plays baseball. No matter how the 2018 season ends, I’ll always have that.

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1 Editor's Note: As the chief baseball fan Restless Hearts, Rob and I are from time to time self-indulgent in our baseball-based writing. Be assured, we could end up writing about baseball with much greater frequency. What you see from us amounts to what is actually great restraint.^↩

2 His defense is embarrassingly bad, is what I’m saying. Oh, he also said some stuff about a gay former baseball player back in 2015 that made a lot of people really angry.^↩

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3 Mere Christianity, book 4, chapter 11.^↩

Reflections from the Artist Formerly Known as Tent Boy

by Rob Goodale



I am going to die, is what I told them, “them” being my exceedingly patient mother and father, both of whom had nervous smiles plastered across their faces. They had just finished the first leg of the forty-sixth iteration of the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa, better known by its catchy acronym -- RAGBRAI -- which entails roughly five hundred miles on a bicycle but also every kind of homemade pie you can imagine and tenderloin sandwiches bigger than your head and a great deal of laughter and craft beer tents and spaghetti dinners hosted by churches in tiny Iowa farm towns and nights spent sleeping in a stranger’s backyard in a tent, which is where I come in.

Due to ligamental limitations, I was not medically capable of riding a bicycle for any mileage whatsoever, let alone seventy miles a day, every day, for a week. So instead, I drove a fifteen-passenger van from town to town as part of my parents’ team’s support crew, transporting gear and stocking coolers and, most crucially, putting up and taking down a dozen tents every day. These tents were all different shapes and sizes -- the dumbest one, by far, was pentagonal, for no good earthly reason other than to invite a penitential mood into the proceedings.

Quoting Coldplay isn’t a thing I would like to do in print very often, but since my pride is already shattered and lying on the side of a highway somewhere in Story County, here goes: when it comes to putting up and taking down a dozen tents every day for a week, nobody said it was easy, but no one ever said it would be this hard (that’s from The Scientist). I was woefully underprepared for this.

Mom and Dad had made the mistake of asking me how the tents went, which is when I told them that I was going to die. It had taken nearly five hours to put up all of the tents, and both my body and my spirit were on the verge of breaking. I could hardly walk. I was afraid to sit down because I was reasonably certain I would not be able to stand up. My hands, whose labor experience had previously been limited to turning pages in books and pouring whiskey into a glass, began shedding their outer layer of skin in an attempt to escape further punishment. About three hours in, I overheard my lower back, hamstrings, and quadriceps whispering to one another about unionizing and going on strike. Fortunately for me, they ran out of energy before they could launch a full-scale mutiny.

And yet, as they say in the movies about torture, it’s not the physical part that gets to you -- it’s the mental aspect. If my muscles and joints were creaking under the weight of menial labor, they were in mint condition compared to my mind, which was A, embarrassed to be so totally destroyed by such a simple task; B, terrified at the prospect of repeating the day’s misery another six times; and C, ten thousand percent sure that there was no way in a frozen hell I would be able to survive.

So, I told my parents I was going to die, and they both forced a chuckle with those nervous smiles still frozen on their faces, and I shuffled off to find a beer. Night came, and morning followed: the first day.

I drove that fifteen passenger van from the Mississippi River back to the center of the state, where my motley tribe makes its home. This drive presented ample opportunity for reflection (and also for rest, which was bad since I was alone in the van, and so was combated with cold brew coffee and sunflower seeds). I realized that the progression over my week as Tent Boy mirrored, in an uncanny way, the first stages of my career as a teacher.

And then something strange happened: I continued to do the work. Each day, the sun rose and cast its brilliant light on a job that seemed a shade less daunting than it had the day before. The blisters on my hands turned to calluses. I learned the proper pacing, both physically and mentally, to endure the work, and then to my utter amazement, to enjoy it. By Friday, I was actually sad that it was over.

In the weeks preceding the first day of class, people warned me that the first year of teaching was a gauntlet one could hope merely to survive. It is kind of them, I thought to myself, to try to lower my own expectations and do what they can to set me up for success, but I am a young person filled with zeal and so while perhaps these people found teaching hard, this is what I was made for, and I will surely not find it too difficult, is what I thought to myself, like an idiot.

I remember making it to the end of the first class of that day, wearied from the effort of keeping the attention of two dozen sixteen-year-olds for an hour, but generally pleased with myself. Then the bell rang, another thirty juniors poured into the room, and with them, a wave of panic as I realized I had to repeat what I had just done another four times before I could leave.

When three o’clock finally, mercifully arrived on that first day, my roommate and I shuffled wordlessly to our car, too tired to speak. Though I do not remember the homeward commute, I am convinced that we sailed above the crowd of cars on the interstate, carried by the angel of the Lord. We staggered up to our tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex and promptly passed out for about four hours. When we finally woke up, we each ate a small bit and, bewildered, tried in vain to imagine doing it all again the next day. But we did. And before long, we learned not only to endure the labor, but to enjoy it.

The first few steps of any endeavor bring with them a turnstile of exhilaration, dread, panic, and exhaustion, particularly when the new work is imbued with uncertainty, and even more so when it is work that is thrust upon us without our consent. It is acceptable, at the first opportunity for rest, to collapse in a heap of dying expectations and wounded ego -- to be expected, even.

But in due time, left foot follows right foot follows left, and the sun eases itself into prone position under cover of shimmering starlight, and leaves grow crisp and depart from their branches so that floral infants can blossom in their place. Filled with a nonnative strength and beckoned onward by love itself, we discover that nothing is ever quite as terrifying or impossible as it seemed at the outset, when we stood alone on the threshold of life.

As I packed away a dozen tents on Saturday for what will, in all likelihood, be the final time in my illustrious career, I marveled at what God hath wrought. Sure, it may be a bit foolhardy to scrutinize such a lowly exercise in search of deep meaning, but is that not the very reason the Word Became Flesh? To drench our world with a superabundance of grace, so much so that some may even be found in the midst of tents, bicycles, and beer?

Please Won't You Be My Neighbor?

by Rob Goodale

A few days ago, my roommate and I walked down the road to the Neon Theater, an absolute gem of a movie house: two screens, cheap popcorn, decent beer selection, nothing like your average cinema and its much-maligned watered-down Cherry Cokes for an extra 25 cents. The Neon was showing Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the new documentary about a Presbyterian minister from Pittsburgh named Fred Rogers.

In truth, I did not grow up in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. I was familiar with the show, of course, but I spent much of my formative years splitting residences between the Island of Sodor and the Hundred Acre Wood. An irritatingly precocious tot, it wasn’t long before I began demanding to be treated like a grown-up, and because I was a quick study I knew that nowhere was this more important than in my entertainment habits.

Grown-ups argued about sports and used humor as either a shield or sometimes a weapon and told stories about bad guys hurting good guys and good guys hurting them back, and so that’s what I imagined it meant to be a grown-up. While this tragically was and largely remains empirically true, such empty show has never been the real stuff of maturity. All along, the square geezer with the cardigan and the trolley was quietly, gently, patiently insisting that there was another way.

In his three decades on television, Fred Rogers demonstrated a unique brand of holiness. He was exceptional not because of transcendent talent or exceeding genius, but because he sincerely desired to greet each human person as a neighbor, even if he wasn’t entirely sure what it would cost him. He did this again and again, mostly with the same children that the rest of the entertainment industry greeted solely as a source of income.

He had a unique way of making people feel seen, which Tom Junod described in a 1998 feature for Esquire Magazine: “There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me.” This struck me as eerily similar to the way C.S. Lewis described saints in Mere Christianity: “Every now and then one meets them. Their voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant… You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but need you less.”

Rogers knew from its advent that television would be not just a means of communication, but a ritual: that we would be transformed by what we watched on TV. He believed that the space between a human being, especially a young human being, and a television screen was holy ground, and he was persistent in treating it as such.

But what perhaps made Mister Rogers most exceptional, at least in my eyes, was the way he followed Christ. He recognized the inherent incontrovertible immutable indelible belovedness of each human person: that before anything else, each of us is, as Pope Francis says, “looked upon by the Lord in love.”

Fred Rogers embraced the universal dignity of the human being not primarily as mere dogma or concept, but as a mission: his every word and action was imbued with that reality, so that his whole life became what Pope Benedict XVI described as “that act of the entire being that we call love.”

He is, in my humble and unqualified opinion, a saint: a pillar of human goodness who belongs in the same breath as other 20th century giants like Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. He will never, of course, be recognized as such by the Catholic Church -- a sad byproduct of centuries of human division -- but I brazenly believe that he belongs in my litany.

As the film ended and the house lights came back up, there was a pregnant pause. No one in the theater spoke. Hardly anyone moved. Sitting on the aisle in the second-to-last row, I myself had an unobstructed path to rush on to the next thing (there is always a next thing, isn’t there?), yet I too hesitated. Perhaps it was because we were all emotionally frayed, our feelings a bit too near the surface for the sunlight. Perhaps we were subconsciously obeying our training and waiting for a vague, wasteful, and only-infinitesimally-relevant post-credit scene. Or perhaps the forty or so human persons gathered in that tiny theater in downtown Dayton silently and collectively recognized a yearning to linger in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as long as we could.

Pipe, Pen, and Rye Close at Hand

by Rob Goodale

I have once more found occasion to alight on the massive wooden rocking chair which makes its home on the front porch, accompanied by the night sky; pipe, pen, and rye close at hand, watching the cars stroll by and thinking of you.

But for the battered state of my heart and your conspicuous absence, it is perfect.

Normal units of measurement seem inadequate with regard to the passage of time. How much is a score? Twenty? Admittedly, that might be overdoing it just a bit.

Three fortnight and ten days ago, I held the gaze of my best friend for what increasingly appears to be the last time -- or, at least, the last time for a very long while. Her gaze, of course, a pale substitute for her hand, much less her person, but we make do in such times.

It has been a strange few months since that small section of the world I foolishly call my own shifted off of its axis. I watch as dear friends and acquaintances alike visibly struggle to find the proper way to broach the subject; they inevitably ask how I am doing, and I can scarce find anything to say. “I’m okay,” I tell them, trusting that particular arrangement of those two particular words to carry far more weight than their approved load-bearing capacity.

Mostly, life is the same. I still cook. I still write. I still watch baseball. I still see old friends, and I still smile. I do listen to more Fleetwood Mac than I used to, which I suppose is something. I also find myself here on the porch rather often; the silent companions I find here seem to be the only whose invitations I never find difficult to accept.

All the ingredients which have made up my life for the past several years remain intact; yet the taste is not quite right without the stock which bound them all together. I suppose people aren’t meant to be compared to chicken stock. That may have been part of the problem all along.

There is no good way to explain the breaking of a heart, nor is there of hurrying it along in the mending. One can gamely attempt to assemble the pieces and loop them once or twice with string and scotch tape, but the true mending cannot be helped with anything other than deliberate waiting, and there is no telling how much.

And so I am left to my pipe and my pen and my rye, sending out silent pleading prayers into the purpling ether and asking the Living Beauty to help them find their intended target.

May she know that I adore her, and am trying to do that less while loving her more, the adoring, of course, rightfully belonging only to Him. May she know she is loved, and may that love, the love of the cosmos’ creator -- but also of very particular persons with faces and names and words -- penetrate her soul and heal it. And may we both, in our unspeakable brokenness, stop waiting, no matter how badly it may hurt to move.

I do not know what resolution is in store, only that I will in all likelihood detest it, and that it will be incomparably better than this.

Deep within tired & aching bones

by Rob Goodale

There is no substitute,
No polyphonic chant or tinkling piano
which can as adequately capture
the gratitude buried deep within
tired and aching human bones
compared to the roaring cacophony
of pages flipping and
pencils scribbling and
(best of all)
stomachs churning
which splashes onto the cozy backdrop of silence
as we sit together on the floor
gathered around the shiny brass box
concealing the Life of the World
in the corner of the room,
and it makes me smile.

The Trouble With Milking the Clock

by Rob Goodale

Good news, friends -- I finally filed my tax returns! The seven days I had to spare this year marks a career high, to the best of my recollection. I’m super proud of myself, and I’ve decided to reward myself by writing a blog post and having a bit of weeknight whiskey¹ (a rare occurrence ‘round these parts).

You see, for the vast majority of my life, I have been a serial procrastinator. When I was in college, I would often wait until the night before big papers were due and thrive off of the adrenaline coursing through my veins as deadlines approached to whip up something passable but mediocre.² I am the king of *shrug* “Good enough.”

One of my favorite ways to kill time back in the day was by playing video games. I never quite got into the first-person shooters like Halo or Call of Duty because I was bad at them. My go-to game was always EA Sports’ NCAA Football.³ Beginning in middle school, my yearly back-to-school ritual included the purchase of two things: a new pair of shoes, and the latest version of NCAA Football. I would spend most of every fall racking up virtual championships and filling virtual record books. With each passing year, the developers worked to add new features to update the gameplay and give teenagers talking points when it came time to make their case to their parents about why they needed to buy the same game every August.

Warning, we’re about to enter some serious football geekiness here for a paragraph or two.

One of the most interesting features that was introduced along the way was a setting that affected how the play clock and game clock would run when your team was on offense. The standard setting ran off about ten seconds each time you huddled to call a play, but there were also “aggressive” and “conservative” settings. The aggressive setting basically put your team into an up-tempo, no-huddle offense that maximized the number of plays you could run. The conservative setting, on the other hand, made the play clock and game clock automatically run down to six seconds each time you broke the huddle and came to the line of scrimmage.

The aggressive setting was helpful if you wanted to run up the score, or if you were trying to come back from a deficit late in the game. The conservative setting, on the other hand, was helpful if you wanted to use as much time as possible not playing football, most of the time because your team was leading late in the game. This tactic, which is known as “milking the clock”, is frequently used in real life late-game situations,⁴ and it was cool to have this bit of reality included in a video game.

The trouble with the conservative clock setting, though, is that you end up wasting a heckuva lot of time. It’s also really tough to switch back and forth between milking the clock and trying to score efficiently -- both in real life and in video games.⁵ Once you’ve adopted the time-wasting mentality, it’s pretty easy to get stuck there.

In video game football, wasting time is not the worst thing in the world -- though it pains me to admit it, none of the things that happen in video games are real or matter, like, at all. Wasting time is, I suppose, the general point of video games. But in recent days, I have noticed that I tend to put my actual real life in conservative clock mode.

Years spent perfecting the art of procrastination with Twitter, Netflix, random games on my phone, and taking naps have given me a particular set of skills when it comes to milking the clock of life. Whenever I’m stressed out, or don’t want to deal with a particular problem, I turn on conservative clock mode and waste time until I can busy myself with something else.

These distractions aren’t bad in and of themselves -- there are situations that undoubtedly call for Twitter and naps -- but when they become a means for me to try to escape life, I detach myself from the present. My old arch nemesis Screwtape has some thoughts about the present which seem relevant here:

The humans live in time but [God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things: to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which [God] has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present -- either by meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Milking the clock detaches me from the Present -- from the nasty bits which cause stress and frustration, to be sure, but also from the good parts as well: from the Cross, from grace, from God. Sooner or later, I will have to re-engage with the Present, and all those things which I hoped to avoid -- taxes, lesson plans, blog posts, etc -- will undoubtedly be waiting there for me. There is no escaping the Cross, and thank God for that.

The motto of the Congregation of Holy Cross, the religious community that founded Notre Dame and various other schools throughout the country, is Ave Crux, Spes Unica -- Hail the Cross, Our Only Hope. Blessed Basil Moreau, the founder of the congregation, recognized the incontrovertible fact that the best thing about Christianity -- indeed, the thing about Christianity -- is the resurrection. Trouble is, at least for us weak-willed procrastinators, is that there is no resurrection without a crucifixion. And therefore the Cross, which on its surface appears to be a grotesque weapon of torture, execution, and terrorism, is in fact the only path to achieve eternal life, and is therefore the source of all of our hope as Christians.

The Cross with which Our Lord commanded each of us take up and follow him is, to say the very least, uncomfortable. If I imagine myself standing with the disciples and hearing Jesus’ exhortation to follow him in this way, my first instinct probably would have been to start playing Sudoku in the dirt. Sure, I’ll take up my Cross eventually, but first I really need to find out what seventeen different beat writers tweeted about the Cubs game today.

The all-important prelude to carrying my Cross and discovering the hope and grace that reside in it is to take it up, to exercise some fortitude when Netflix asks if I’m really still watching re-runs of New Girl, stop milking the clock, and live in the Present. It is only in doing so that I can hope to encounter the freedom promised me by Perfect Love.

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1 Tonight’s spirit of choice: Not A King Whiskey, from Journeyman Distillery in Three Oaks, Michigan. Journeyman is a hallowed ground among my friend group, and this particular whiskey uses George Washington’s original mash bill from his private distillery at Mount Vernon. I can neither confirm nor deny whether I’m listening to “Right Hand Man” from Hamilton as I sip and type.^↩

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2 This is definitely also how I write lesson plans and blog posts. We all have areas for growth.^↩

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3 The NCAA Football series was discontinued in 2013 as part of the NCAA’s ongoing moral quandary about using the likenesses of student athletes to make stacks of cash without paying the same student athletes who were generating all the income. Yet another reason the NCAA is trash.^↩

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4 Or, if you’re Kirk Ferentz and my childhood favorite, the Iowa Hawkeyes… for entire games. Because Ferentz and Iowa are both extremely and endearingly boring, and in both cases your best option is often to do absolutely nothing for as long as possible.^↩

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5 There’s another version of this clock-milking strategy in basketball, which I almost used as the central example. Teams who lead late in games will often abandon the strategies that gave them the lead, and adopt a stalling tactic known as “four corners,” where four of the five players literally go stand in separate corner and generally stop doing anything that resembles playing basketball.^↩

Something about Desire

by Rob Goodale

I’ve spent most of this Lenten season trying to understand desire. It’s exhausting -- rarely is my mind quiet, rarely is my spirit still. I observe within myself a constant longing, like a dull roar, for some unnamed thing whose face is ever-so-slightly obscured. I want, is what I’m saying, and I don’t even know what I want, only that I want it. The clearer the picture becomes, the less certain I am.

I am certain, however, that most of the time the object of this desire is not Our Lord. Most of the time He is a welcome guest, invited to observe or maybe participate sparingly but certainly not more than would be polite. I’m not proud of this.

I’m even less proud of my response when I find these unspecific desires are not easily satisfied (because of course they’re not, I can’t even figure out what I’m desiring). A mature and reasonable person would greet such a predicament with tranquil realism, adjusting some aspect of his life in order to feel less anguish.

I am not a mature and reasonable person.

Most of the time, the unsatiated desire within makes me want to kick and scream and throw things, to throw a tantrum the likes of which have not been seen in decades. I want to storm into a room in the middle of a rant and slam the door behind me, frightening everyone. I want to break every plate and bowl and glass in a Williams Sonoma storefront. I want to emit deranged screams so disturbing that no one who hears them will be able to sleep for a week. I want to cause some real destruction, is what I’m saying.

I obviously can’t do those things. And so instead I ask the Holy and Righteous One to kill the desire, to take it away from me, to replace it with placid indifference, detached from needing anything or anyone to fill me up. He may do this, in time, but it does not seem to be high on His to-do list.

And so instead of being destroyed, the desire persists. And so instead of kicking and screaming and throwing things, I try to understand myself better.

A little more than two years ago, Jenny (who writes for the Restless Hearts, a very good blog) gave me a book by Caryll Houselander called The Reed of God, and because I’m the sort of human who is never reading fewer than four books at a time, I am still reading it. God seems to have a way of working through the books I read -- I am constantly in awe of the way I seem to stumble into exactly what I need to hear. Which brings me to Houselander’s words on desire:

“In every man the impulse and desire to pursue his happiness, his own good, is deeply rooted. It is a universal drive and drag toward what is good for him which dominates every man born. This equality of desire makes every man search, makes everyone (whether he knows it or not) seek, seek, seek all his life for the lost Child.” (Houselander, The Reed of God, p. 120)

She sees something that I have only begun to glimpse, something that Pope Benedict XVI wrote about extensively in his 2005 encyclical Deus Caritas Est: desire is the great engine, the coal-burning furnace within each person that drives them to respond to the Love that spills over into the entire world.

Desire isn’t bad; without desire I would be listless, a boat without an oar, completely at the mercy of the sea. The trouble comes when I set my course wrongly. Trying to fill the God-shaped hole in me with anything that is not God -- food, books, money, other people -- is like pouring whiskey into the gas tank. It may seem like it’s going to work, and if you didn’t know any better it might seem right, but in the end it’s just going to destroy your car and waste a lot of good whiskey.

My literary spirit animal, C.S. Lewis, described this problem with startling precision:

“Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” (Lewis, The Weight of Glory)

My desires, be they for notoriety or intimacy or meaning or pleasure, are all, at their core, desires for relationship: to know and be known. At the heart of who I am is a desire to love and be loved. What I need is not for this desire to be taken away, but made stronger, firmer, more dialed in. What I need is to learn to see God in everything, not sometimes, but all the time, and to glorify God by learning how to love better.

A Frank Conversation with The Carpenter’s Kid from Nazareth

by Rob Goodale

Dear sir: I don’t understand you, man.

I hear your words -- how you greet people, how you make them feel welcome. I hear how you know exactly what words every single person most desperately longs to hear. How you comfort. Reassure. Challenge. Provoke. Say yes. Say no. Make demands. Offer second chances… thirds, too, when necessary.

I watch the way you move -- with a quiet ferocity, a mission of a man, every step carefully measured and precisely placed. Every sinew and fiber of your being sings of your purpose, which is at turns perplexing and terrifying. Pointing to people and calling their names, asking strangers for help, fiddling around in the dirt. Not a moment or movement wasted. Every moment and movement wasted.

I watch the way you don’t move -- content to sit at the table longer than anyone else, waiting for things the rest of us cannot imagine. Remaining dumbfoundingly still, receiving each wandering, tear-filled eye. Hiding out of sight, just beyond the door, somewhere in between sleep and wakefulness, just in case a lonely wayfarer realizes they’re looking for you.

I feel the way the entire room gravitates toward you -- whether you thunder and shake with the tempestuous force of every storm literally ever all combined into one, or rest with a placid serenity that would make the glassy surface of a country pond at dawn blush for causing a scene.

I feel the way five minutes with you carries me six and half nautical miles farther than I have any business sailing in this weather.

I feel the piercing, blinding shame that screams through my heart as I see my reflection in your eyes and recognize, in a moment of unspoken understanding, that I have failed you every day of my life.

I feel the even more humiliating ache in my bones borne from the equally unspoken understanding that, in the end, you do not care about my failures, so long as I am not too proud to see them and greet them like friends who, in another life, used to be enemies; to let you take them and do unimaginable things with them, things that will surely sting a bit and which the neighbors may find horrifying.

I hear. I watch. I feel. And I do not understand a speck of it.

What are you doing? Where are you going?

And (this question burns ineffably in my soul)

May I come along?

The Interminable Parade of Plastic, Glass, and Aluminum Nickels… (Or, Why Spiritual Direction is Well Worth Your Time)

by Rob Goodale

When I was a kid, we had these massive trash cans in our garage, each roughly the size of a rhinoceros, where we would keep empty cans and bottles. These bottomless containers would collect cans and bottles for months at a time, their capacity mysteriously incongruous with their apparent size.

One of my favorite things about growing up in Iowa was that these empty cans and bottles were each worth a nickel. (This should show you how few noteworthy things there are about growing up in Iowa.) Legend has it this policy was the remnant of some long-forgotten state initiative to cut down on littering, or something like that.

When those preposterously large trash cans finally filled up, we would make pilgrimage to the local grocery store and insert all of our cans and bottles, one by one, into a machine that would count them for us and then give us five cents for each empty. This interminable parade of plastic, glass, and aluminum nickels routinely took the better part of an hour, and the machines were notoriously temperamental -- a slightly-too-crunched can or a bottle without the label could set them off, blinking and hollering and causing a scene. In the end, though, and after much drudgery, we floated on a feeling of ragged and hard-won triumph to collect our reward.

(My parents would often send us kids to make this menial sacrifice to the recycling gods, promising us that we could keep whatever money the machine gave us. I’m fairly certain that, when our miniscule profits were split three ways, we were barely within shouting distance of minimum wage. My parents, in their desperate desire to get us out of the house, were from time to time somewhat unscrupulous.)

Once, though -- and for the life of me I cannot remember what movement of heaven and earth prompted this deviation from the norm, though I know for a fact it was once and only once -- we took our semi-annual stockpile of cans and bottles to a redemption center on the other side of town.

We hauled these great massive balloons weighed down with empty pop cans and wine coolers in from the trunk of my car, prepared to do battle yet again with the electronic receptacle.

Only there was no receptacle, or at least not an electronic one. Instead there was a man, a lone grizzled warrior who seemed to live behind his work station. He heaved the elephantine sack of empties up, nearly over his weathered head, and dumped the entirety of our collection out onto the table before him.

I’ll never forget what came next: this old man, the sort of man who communicates largely through grunts and vague gestures, began rifling through the empties, sifting and sorting with hands like hummingbirds. I remember staring at him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, as he performed a one-man symphony -- aluminum there, glass there, plastic there -- barely seeming to allow the dang things to touch his fingers before they were flying through the air to their proper places, and always finding their proper places.

The entire ritual lasted for less than five minutes, and then we were left to shuffle back to our car in dazed silence. It took longer for me to process what I had witnessed than it took for him to sift and sort six hundred containers and pay us our thirty bucks.

* * *

Most of the time, I treat the stories of my life like empty cans and bottles -- once they’ve been duly enjoyed, I toss them into a mammoth container in the garage, and once or twice a year (usually at the behest of a particularly zealous retreat director) I begrudgingly work my way through them, one at a time, in search of whatever value they might still have. The payoff usually doesn’t seem worth the effort.

My first experience with spiritual direction was not entirely unlike that fateful childhood trip to the redemption center. Instead of shoving one beleaguered story through the machine at a time, hoping it didn’t cause me too much trouble, I watched as a trained master dumped all of them out on the table at once, and began the hypnotic ritual of sifting and sorting.

It is a scary thing, to offer all my empties to somebody else and trust him to sort through them with me.

But, my oh my, what a marvel it is to watch. And I’ve discovered things I didn’t know were there, discovered numerous forgotten stories that have subtly shaped who I am. Armed with the knowledge of what my life has been, and the understanding of how each story connects with the others, I have come to see my life in a brighter light. It’s marvelous.

Spiritual direction isn’t therapy, and it’s not just for “holy people.” Anyone who has empty cans in their garage could use some help going through them. Sure, you could try trudging through them all by yourself, one-by-one, and you might even get something out of it. But entrusting an expert with your junk -- that’s when it really pays off. Those empties are valuable, you know. Even if you didn’t grow up in Iowa.

The Restless Hearts Christmas Mixtape

Orchestrated, Edited, and Introduced by Rob Goodale

I love talking about Christmas traditions. It’s one of my favorite conversational diving boards from which to leap when getting to know somebody; there is a treasure trove of delicious personhood wrapped up in childhood holiday habits. It is a certain type of person from a certain type of family who steadfastly attended Midnight Mass every year on Christmas Eve; this certain type of person is radically different from the “Early” Christmas Eve Mass attendee, who is yet again vastly different from the Christmas-Morning-Or-Bust types.

Going to see Santa Claus at the mall, baking cookies, building snow forts, caroling at nursing homes -- each of these celebratory details reveals something important, and from time to time leads to a delightful conversation wherein someone tries to explain Elf on the Shelf to someone else who has mercifully never heard of such chicanery.

As far as I’m concerned, conversations about the Feast of the Nativity of the Lord begin and end with music, sung at top volume -- at church, in the car, in the kitchen, always at top volume. In the Goodale household, it wasn’t really Christmas until the dulcet tones of Harry Connick, Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas came wafting through the air. To this day, that version of “Sleigh Ride,” with its blaring horns, is the only version I am ever really capable of enjoying.

In recent years, I’ve discovered some beloved Christmas albums of my own: Josh Garrels’ hauntingly beautiful The Light Came Down, Penny & Sparrow’s Christmas Songs, A Johnnyswim Christmas, which is just delightful, and of course, The Oh Hellos’ Family Christmas Album.

I was prepared to go through my own top whatever number of Christmas songs and rant for about 15,000 words about all the stuff I like. Then I thought better of it, in large part because I imagine I am the only one in the entire world who is interested in hearing me do that.

Instead, we rallied the Restless Hearts troops, from the wizened, weary veterans to the fresh recruits, and asked them to share their favorite holiday tunes. As it turns out, not all of them feel the same way about Christmas music.

For the Liturgically Appropriate Among Us

Dan: So “Silent Night” certainly has that old, classic, even mildly cliched feel to it, coming from ages-old Germany. And for those of us who don’t speak German, hearing it with its original German lyrics is something. "Silent Night / Night of Silence" is a newer spin on the time-tested favorite that mixes a slightly more upbeat, punchy sets of lyrics with the more solemn, reflective tone of the original using the same chords and key. The songs can be melded together to even build to an overlaid counterpoint. The choir at my childhood parish would sing it regularly, and the layered pieces bring both musical and nostalgic joy to my ears and heart.

Jenny: Gaudete, Gaudete! Who doesn’t love a rousing 16th century Latin carol? Seriously, have your flagons of mead ready at hand for this one. Translating to “Rejoice, rejoice!”, this hymn is a song of welcome to God born of the Virgin, coming to renew the world. In addition to being a great Christmas song, it came to be a favorite of those in the Echo program when we would absurdly celebrate all the year’s holidays throughout the course of the summer. If you lack flagons of mead, here’s another, tamer version that would be better paired with eggnog.

Erin: My favorite Christmas song is (and this will come as a surprise to no one) strongly influenced by the one and only Father Greg Boyle. I’ve never been a huge Christmas hymn person, but in his chapter on “Kinship” in Tattoos on the Heart, Boyle talks about why "O Holy Night" is one of his favorite hymns, and I’ve never looked back. He focuses on the lines: “Long lay the world in sin and error pining -- ‘til He appeared and the soul felt its worth.” Jesus shows up in our lives and all of a sudden, we feel worthy. This is powerful stuff. Boyle takes it beyond just Jesus’ love and presence, however, explaining that making the soul feel it’s worth is “the job description of human beings seeking kinship.” Our job, in the Christmas season and always, is to make the souls of those around us feel their worth. (Full disclosure, in this passage G also talks about listing to his mom Kathleen Conway Boyle sing the song when he was a child, which may have influenced my fascination.)

A Moment to Consider the Existential Happiness of Elves

Laura: Do all elves have as their telos the making of toys? This is the question raised by Barenaked Ladies’ "Elf's Lament". Is it inherently an elfin vocation to construct gifts for wide-eyed "nice" children, or is the workforce at the North Pole more akin to "indentured servitude," as the song claims? While I'm not the biggest fan of the Rudolph movie, this question was approached via the ostracization of the dentist elf, Hermey.

This is really a silly song, but I enjoy it because it exposes the incoherence of the general secular mythos we have built up around Santa -- an incoherence I'm weighing as we have to make the decision whether to buy into it fully, and how much we could relate it to the real and saintly person of Nicholas of Myra or the consummate self-gift of the Christ child. The song also contains a simple social justice appeal: requesting consciousness of the cost of the gifts you request to those who might manufacture them.

Sweet, Sweet Pangs of Nostalgia

Dan: I’m not a huge Christmas music guy. I don’t love that one radio station that plays it 24/7 starting in November. A pinch of Christmas music as I pass in and out of stores or take a short car ride with someone else controlling the radio is plenty for me. But before I was old enough to have strong opinions about music, and before cars had aux cords and CD players, we had one cassette that lived in our tape deck for the winter: John Denver & The Muppets’ Christmas album (full album here). It’s full of classics that are thoroughly seared into my memory. While “Christmas is Coming” will plant the most delightfully pesky earworm, it’s their rendition of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" that is the flagship song for the album. It features many of the great characters from Muppet lore, most notably the ever-diva Miss Piggy who croons loudly, “Fiiiiiiiiive, gooooooooold, riiiiiiiiiiiings,” which eventually comes with a punchy “buh-dum, bum, bum.” I dare you to listen. Merry Christmas!

Laura: This is certainly my entry from Nostalgiaville. My dad put on the Christmas album from Glad, a Christian a cappella group, every Christmas morning since I can remember (but never before). It was a peaceful bellwether of the Christmas season's arrival after all the anticipation of Advent. The full album is excellent, but my favorite track is this rendition of "Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow", an African-American spiritual. If anyone truly internalized the hope offered to the lowliest of society through the angels' invitation to seek the infant Jesus, it was the slave, and that reads through in the simple but heartfelt lyrics.

Erin: One of the Christmas songs I remember most fondly from my childhood is "I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas". My brother and I discovered this song on a CD of weird Christmas songs (think... “All I Want For Christmas is My Two Front Teeth” and “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”) that we picked up from the library one year and then every year thereafter. And although I had no particular fascination with these “hippo heros,” something about sitting around our house at Christmastime listening to a whiny child’s voice sing about how “only a hippopotamus will do” and how “there’s lots of room for him in our two-car garage” will forever be cemented in my memory.

Spanish Renaissance Hymns Performed by The Monkees

Jenny: Here’s another Renaissance hymn: Ríu Ríu Chíu. My favorite version of this Spanish hymn comes from an unexpected source: the 1960s boy band, the Monkees. Besides being a super chill and beautiful song to listen to, the lyrics are also epic. It talks about God protecting the ewe from the wolf (the Immaculate Conception), and how the infinite God redeems us by making Himself small. Plus, you have to appreciate the really campy 60s video.

Beware: Here Be Scrooges

Tim: Bah, humbug!

Dave: I’ll confess. I don’t really dig Christmas music outside of liturgical settings. But one song beyond all others drives me crazy: "Wonderful Christmastime" by Paul McCartney. I despise this tune so much that I start foaming at the mouth whenever the synthesized beep-boops begin. The good knight’s iconic song is the singular reason why I avoid Christmas radio, and stick to my alternative/indie rock station, which refuses to succumb to the possibility of its cacophonous waves being transmitted all across Portland. I shall also confess that in the realm of popular Christmas music, I love Hanson, the extremely underrated creators of “MmmBop” and “Penny and Me” (they also have a wonderful cover of U2’s “In a Little While”).

So as to not go Scrooging all over the place, my two favorite hymns are “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” and “People Look East”. Seriously, check out that latter video; the choir of kiddos from the famed Ely Cathedral in England absolutely slay (“sleigh”) it. I find that the first carol perfectly sums up the archetypal imagery of light shattering darkness, and I can’t help but consider Tupac’s “The Rose the Grew from Concrete” whenever I hear it. “People Look East,” on the other hand, takes various images of Christ, and offers metaphors for the various Loves that the Christ child embodies: Love the Guest, Love the Rose, Love the Bird, Love the Star, Love the Lord. Nothing short of gorgeous.

Tim: … Fine, I guess if I'm not the only scrooge in this group, I don't have any excuse.

I don't really like listening to Christmas music. I do, however, enjoy singing it, and one of my favorite Christmas songs to sing is "Adeste Fideles/ O Come All Ye Faithful". My affection for the song may stem at least in part from my appreciation for Latin, but I think on a deeper level, I like that the song -- the opening verse, at least -- feels like an invitation. It doesn't start with the "Christmas spirit" in full force, but rather builds toward it. The song starts with a feeling of anticipation and restrained excitement as it invites the listener to come and see and wonder at the newborn king of angels, and only in the following verses arrives at the fuller sense of joy that we associate with Christmas.

Another Christmas song that I rather enjoy singing is "Good King Wenceslaus", which I enjoy partly because of a sentimental attachment. Back in my undergraduate days at ND, I was part of a group that walked around St. Mary's Lake every Sunday evening praying the Rosary, and after the trip that followed the first snowfall of the year, we would sing this carol. After 20 minutes of trudging through the cold and snow, following in the footprints of those ahead of us, the lyrics felt quite appropriate.

Merry Christmas from The Restless Hearts crew!

On Attempting to Cook Chicken on a Very Hot Stove

by Rob Goodale

A couple of weeks ago, I was on retreat with about 40 teenagers. These retreats are always an amazing, exhausting experience of Christian community, and this one was no different -- I'm so deeply thankful for all of the wonderful people I got to spend the week with.

On the retreat, I facilitated a session about storytelling, learning to encounter God’s love in the stories we share with one another, and beginning to see our stories as something for which to be thankful. For this Thanksgiving, I’d like to share one of my stories with you. Appropriately enough, it’s about food.

A few years ago, I was in a graduate school program called Echo -- it’s this strange sort of living organism of a program that’s part grad school, part service program, part job. We took classes in the summers at Notre Dame, and then from August to June, we were sent all over the country to work in Catholic parishes or high schools.

I spent the two academic years of Echo teaching at a Catholic high school in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is about as different from where I grew up as you can find without leaving the country. For starters, there are mountains -- lots of mountains. There are also Mormons -- lots of Mormons! I eventually grew to be really fond of both, but it took awhile for me to come around, and at first it was all very foreign.

Fortunately, I was not sent to Utah alone. One of the essential components of Echo is living in an intentional faith community with several of your classmates.

Sidebar: Living in an intentional community is a strange and wonderful thing that a lot of service programs ask their volunteers to do, and it’s getting more popular at colleges and universities across the country for both undergrads and grad students. Intentional communities share meals and chores around the house, pray together, and generally serve as a built-in social life. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever gotten to be a part of, and all of my stories from that period of my life are better because of community. If you ever get the chance, you should definitely live in an intentional community.

That first year in Utah, I found myself in community with two other people, Tom and Fred. We lived in a tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex. We had sort of gotten to know each other a little bit over the summer, but there was still a lot of unfamiliarity when we all first arrived that August. I really wanted Tom and Fred to like me, but I didn’t want them to know that I really wanted them to like me, so I started looking for opportunities to impress them and make them think I was cool.

As I mentioned, our community shared meals -- we cooked for one another regularly. I had started tinkering in the kitchen as a college student, and felt like I was really starting to come into my own as an amateur chef by the time I started Echo. Most of that confidence, if I'm honest, came from lying on the couch watching cooking shows on TV and thinking to myself, I could do that, so perhaps I should not have been nearly so sure of myself.

One of the first couple of weeks in Utah, it was my turn to cook for my community, and I saw this as a golden opportunity to wow my new friends with my next-level cooking skills.

I decided to make chicken parmesan. I had never made chicken parmesan before, but the recipes I found on Pinterest didn’t seem that complicated: fry up some chicken cutlets, pour some tomato sauce over them, melt some cheese on top, boil some pasta, and bada bing bada boom, you’ve got chicken parmesan.



I head home from school on that Monday, stop at the grocery store having consulted my trusty Pinterest recipe, get what I need, and arrive home, ingredients in hand, ready to work some magic.

Step one in the recipe is to “assemble your workstation.” So I get out three little bowls, one for flour, one for egg, one for breadcrumbs. Step one, check.

Step two is to “heat olive oil.” So I pour the olive oil in a pan, turn the burner on high, and return to my workstation to coat the first chicken cutlet. Into the flour, into the egg wash, into the bread crumbs, and into the pan of hot oil, where it quickly reaches a pleasing sizzle. Satisfied with my work, I turn to prepare the next cutlet for frying.

Even though I had never tried to make fried chicken before, it turns out my community members Tom and Fred had, and they’re both sitting nearby in our tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex, watching TV in the living room with a growing curiosity about what is happening a few feet away in the kitchen. They know what I don’t: it doesn’t take very long to fry chicken, and the oil shouldn’t be too hot. For the moment, though, neither of them say anything.

I dredge the next cutlet, into the flour, into the egg wash, into the breadcrumbs… but when I turn back to drop it into the pan, I am greeted with a giant cloud of black smoke, billowing off of the stove.

I panic. For some reason, the first thing that pops into my head is that if I don’t find some way to get rid of this smoke, the alarm is going to go off in our tiny apartment in a massive apartment complex, and roughly 500 people are going to be very, very angry at me, which would not be a good way to impress my new community members.

With this thought in the front of my mind, and basically nothing else to keep it company, I grab the pan and frantically but wordlessly shuffle past Tom and Fred in the living room, through the sliding glass door, and onto our balcony -- our tiny apartment balcony on the fourth floor of a massive apartment complex -- put the still smoking pan down onto the linoleum-covered balcony, turn back around, and walk back inside.

Tom and Fred, God bless their beautiful souls, watch all of this happen with absolute tranquility. After I return to the living room, Fred does, however, silently and quickly go out to retrieve the pan before it can permanently adhere to the linoleum-covered balcony, brings it back inside, dumps some baking soda on it -- which is actually what you should do in case of a grease fire, by the way -- and turns back from the kitchen to find me, collapsed into a crumpled heap of shame on the couch.

They should yell at me. They should laugh at me. They should tell me what an idiot I am. But they doesn’t. It’s quiet for a moment, and then, Tom asks, mercifully and without a hint of condescension in his voice, “Hey Rob, do you want me to take over for you?”

Defeated and humiliated, I nod, and then proceed to pay very close attention to a spot in the carpet for what feels like the next several hours.

A short while later, dinner is ready -- delicious chicken parmesan, courtesy of the most experienced chef in the community. In the days, weeks, months, and years that follow, this will become one of the most-often referenced stories for our community, a story that always ends in fits of laughter. But for that night, there are no jokes to be made at my expense -- just three community members, sharing a meal and trying to survive our first year of teaching together.

Tom and Fred responded to my error -- an error brought on by absurd levels of arrogance and vanity -- with uncommon mercy and love, and to this day, we pinpoint that story as the beginning of our collective friendship, a friendship that has since been the source of innumerable stories of grace.

The holidays can be a tough and stressful time for a vast number of reasons. When your second cousin or mother-in-law or whoever starts burning the fried chicken, and then tries to melt the balcony, I really hope you remember that she’s probably just trying to get you to like her, and refrain from ripping her up. Just go get the pan, for goodness sake, and smile.

The Joyful Torment of Fandom

by Rob Goodale

It’s no secret, really, that I have an emotional attachment to the Chicago Cubs, a professional baseball club that won the World Series last year, in case you hadn’t heard. From time to time, this attachment leads me to make decisions that are of questionable prudence, such as spending precious stipend dollars on inside-joke t-shirts or eschewing healthy sleep habits for a solid month to watch postseason games on my laptop in the wee hours of the morning. ¹

Of course, the Cubs finally won it all last year, after 108 years of, um, not winning. I tried to write about it, but to scrunch it down into something expressed in mere words seemed offensive. I spent last winter basking in the surreal glow of a season that didn’t end in heartbreak, perplexed at the reality that a collection of grown men in pajamas hitting a ball with a stick had garnered such depth of meaning, and also wondering with some trepidation whether that meaning -- and the unbridled distillation of joy that comes with it -- might dissipate on the other side of victory.

This season has been largely devoid of the same frivolity that marked the Cubs’ climb to glory, which really started in earnest in August of 2015. As Brett Taylor recently observed in an insightful piece on Bleacher Nation, while we described the 2015 and 2016 seasons with words like “magic” and “destiny,” the 2017 campaign can really only be accurately summed up with the word “grind.” There have been highlights, to be sure -- on a Saturday afternoon in July, as I drove to my new home in Kentucky, I listened as the Cubs ran the Tear Their Hearts Out of Their Chests and Show It to Them as They Die Play² against the Cardinals, which was pretty dang wonderful -- but on the whole, being the defending champions who are expected to win it all has been a freaking slog compared to being upstart renegade youngsters who don’t give a flying pig about your unwritten rules, Cardinal fans.

Despite the year-long drudgery, the Cubs managed to win their division and reach the playoffs for the third straight year, which hadn’t happened since ‘06-’08… NINETEEN-OH-SIX TO NINETEEN-OH-EIGHT. I am abundantly aware that the success of these strangers to whom I am tenuously tied is virtually unprecedented.

The first-round matchup against the Washington Nationals was a grueling five-gamer; the finale prompted the same heart palpitations that I thought might’ve died last year. The Nats outplayed the Cubs in four of the five games. The Cubs won three of them anyway.

Holy freaking crap baskets.

— Rob Goodale (@rgoody33) October 13, 2017

Then, before anyone could catch their breath, the Los Angeles Dodgers won the first three games of the NLCS. The Cubs were out of lives. Leading up to Game Four last Wednesday, I spent the day trying to talk myself out of being emotionally invested: this season has been more than a worthy follow up to last year’s championship, I told myself. I am happy, and if it ends tonight, I’m not going to let it hurt.

A funny thing happened.



Willson Contreras hit a dang moonshot. And then Javy Baez, a human highlight GIF, the Best Things About Baseball Incarnate, hit two. And blew a bubble during the second one.



The Cubs won Game Four, 3-2. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.

I drove to work the next morning, riding a wave of irrational confidence. He who recommends lower expectations as a salve for disappointment is surely not a baseball fan. Crawling along I-75, I began performing amateur mental calculus, figuring out how many things would have to break the Cubs’ way for a historic turnaround, conjuring comparisons to the 2004 Red Sox³ and foolishly encouraging my hopes to soar far higher than any sensible person would allow.

There in the car, a Pope Benedict XVI quote popped in my head, because as you know by now, in addition to being a shameless Cubs fan, I’m also an unabashed theology nerd.

“I… become like someone in love,

someone whose heart is open to being shaken up by another.” ⁴

Of course winning a World Series doesn’t make it hurt less the next year. Of course I can’t talk myself out of being affected by the end of a Cubs season. For better or for worse, all those years of watching on WGN at my grandmother’s house and listening to Pat Hughes and Ron Santo on the radio broadcast in the car with my dad have shaped me into a certain kind of person, one whose heart is irrevocably open to being shaken up by this stupid game.

The Cubs’ season ended a night later, in a dull and mercifully stress-free 11-1 drubbing. It still hurt. I spent the weekend searching for phantom box scores, scratching at a no-longer-existent itch. For seven months out of every twelve, the melody of Cubs games form the soundtrack to my life. It’s fitting, if a bit on the nose, that the radio station that carries their games is called The Score.

I’m already looking forward to spring training, and a winter full of reconstructing expectations. Being a baseball junkie, for better or for worse, is part of who I am. It has formed the structural undergirding of countless memories, and has been the seed planted in the earth that in turn yields lasting friendships.

The joyful torment of fandom, of allowing a small part of myself to live and die based on something entirely beyond my control, lives on. And for that I am most grateful.

---

1 Last year during the Cubs’ magical playoff run, I was living in Cork, Ireland. This did not deter me; I didn’t miss a single out.^↩

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2 H/T @Aisle424 on Twitter.^↩

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3 The only team to ever come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a seven-game series, a feat immortalized in the excellent 30 for 30 documentary Four Days In October and, more importantly for my mother and girlfriend, in the 2005 film Fever Pitch.^↩

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4 Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, pg 197.^↩

I Witnessed Your Baptism Today

by Rob Goodale

There were two other baptisms, actually, though it was the last one -- yours -- that etched itself into my temporal lobe. No disrespect to the other two tots, who were equal recipients of sacramental grace. They simply were not as striking as you.

I watched from my pew with barely muted awe as a tiny human was completely disrobed, there literally in front of God and everybody, and thrice dunked into surely frigid water. You screamed and kicked and spit and probably shouted all kinds of words that would have made your mother blush, had anyone been able to understand you. No one did, which is fortunate for your mother, although it probably just made you even madder.

Once, twice, three times submerged into the living water, and then wrapped back up in your robe, caterwauling the entire time. Your father held you higher than Rafiki held Simba, the proudest dad in the whole dang place. It was then that I considered, despite our language barrier, whether perhaps I really did understand you after all. And I became a bit envious, truth be told, because there have been a great many times that I wanted to scream and kick and spit and shout all kinds of words that would make my mother blush. Since I am 26 and not currently being plunged into frigid water, such a reaction would not be met with same the smiles and laughter that greeted your crisis.

You did not comprehend what was being done to you, only that it was unpleasant and unfamiliar and probably entirely shame-inducing, what with the public nakedness. How could you have known that at that very moment you were being plunged not only into the water, but into the most beautiful wild tragic desperate love story in the history of everything, one that spans millennia, and one that already has a happy ending.

The real hang up of the thing is, even if you had known that, the experience would have been just as excruciating, which is a word I use advisedly. I daresay this will not be the last time that someone you can barely see and do not recognize thrusts you headlong into a vast pool of incomprehensible grace.

Gazing at you up there on the altar made me do some real deep thinking, man. I thought of my favorite cantankerous child-turned-dragon, who had a somewhat similar experience. When I touch the water, they tell me I could be set free. Nobody seems to want to talk about how painful or terrifying it might be, except for you. Thank you for your prophetic screams, pleading with me to see the depth of love that made all this possible. Someday, perhaps you will see the significance of this day, and know why it made me cry.

Why I Write in Books

by Rob Goodale

My mother is a grade-school librarian. Mom, I am sorry for what I’m about to do.

Contrary to what my mother and every other self-respecting and responsible librarian across the globe teaches to young people, everyone should be writing in their books.

A quick note to appease those tasked with preserving and shepherding books to the youths: fear not. Nobody should write in a book that came from a library; I am not a monster. Whenever possible, you should buy books, especially if it’s a book you love. If you don’t own a particular book, do not write in it unless you have the express written consent of Major League Baseball, or the owner of the book.

But wait, you say, confused. Why would I write on the screen of my e-reader? Dear friend, I daresay you know how I will respond: get yourself a real book.

E-readers are fine, if a bit over-fancy, and I will admit that they are quite helpful when traveling, but there is no substitute for the feel -- and, crucially, the smell -- of a well-loved book in your hands. I am also of the opinion that there is no finer interior decoration in the world than a well-stocked bookshelf, and it would look kind of dumb if said bookshelf were completely empty except for a sad, lonely Kindle lying forlorn on the second shelf.

Now that you’ve procured for yourself a real, honest-to-God book with real life paper pages, the next and second-most important thing to acquire is, of course, a pencil. Some might favor the indelible mark of an inkpen. I find this a bit too serious for my tastes; a pen will work if you’re in a pinch, but when you don’t quite get the words right in your margin scribbles on the first try, or when a significant jostling turns your underline into a strikethrough, it’s nice to be able to erase and try again.



After that, it’s really about offering a sort of running commentary, sometimes using words. Be an active reader: when you find nuggets of grace or pithy barbs of brilliance, underline them; if they are exceptionally long, or if your hand is exceptionally unsteady, use brackets. If a passage makes you think of some other book or something your friend once said in his patented off-the-cuff way of saying astoundingly radiant things, then say so in the margins. Should you be reading what my friend Sean would call “one of those put it down and stare out the window in contemplation for a while books,” then make a little mark of your choosing, put the book down, and stare out the window in contemplation for a while. When the author uses a word you don’t understand, look up a definition and write it; if he or she puts words together in an unintelligible sequence, draw a confused-face emoji (or, for the old fashioned among you like Jenny K, a question mark).

It is all a sort of offering -- perhaps only to your future self when you come back around to your familiar old friends again. Far sweeter than that, though, is when you pass the book off to another. Your brackets and your margin doodles and your stars and exclamation points all become shared experiences of wonder and wisdom and grace, which is just the best.

Imagine the experience of walking through the halls of Hogwarts for the first time, or discovering a secret passageway into another world in the back of a mysterious wardrobe, or hearing the Vagrant Preacher from Nazareth reveal for the first time that he is, in fact, the Messiah, and that those who wish to follow him must carry their own cross. Then imagine sharing these experiences with others through the magic of tiny scrawling in the margins of books. I do believe you will begin to get the picture.

What Do You Say?

by Rob Goodale

Have you ever watched all the ways a person answers a difficult question before he ever opens his mouth? The shifting of weight from one foot to the other; a pensive stare toward whatever happens to be six to eight inches to the left of the inquisitor; a clearing of the throat; a sudden sharp inhale or, contrariwise, a slow exhale.

I wonder what answers Simon gave before he opened his mouth to offer those now-famous words: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” If I were him, I probably would have stammered a bit and kicked some rocks and darted around the room with my eyes, all of which would obviously have been to say:

Everyone is looking at me and I know I could say something lame and easy and obvious like ‘Rabbi, you are quite good at telling a joke and also my first pick every time we play dodgeball,’ but I think I know who you actually are and so I’m about to stomp out onto a particularly flimsy limb okay here goes...

And I hope -- against all evidence of my own feebleness and fickleness -- that I would say what Simon said, in total disregard of how utterly batty a suggestion it is that a man who walks with feet like mine and speaks with a mouth like mine might be, to steal a line from Saint Paul, the one from whom and through whom and for whom all things exist (see Romans 11:36). That would be a cool thing to say out loud.

But part of me wonders why we are asked to say anything at all. What if I got the answer wrong? It seems like we could avoid a lot of confusion, Lord, if you just lectured and I took really good notes. This socratic method of teaching leaves a lot of room for error.

Without the room for error, though, I suppose there would be no value in getting anything right. That’s the crux (pun very much intended) of the whole free-will thing, isn’t it? One has the freedom to choose how one wants to answer that question, which is the question, when one gets right down to it. The answer one chooses to give to this question decides pretty much everything else, after all: what gets you out of bed in the morning, how you spend your nights and weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.

Where we’ve all collectively gone wrong is, we think true freedom, freedom to choose, gives us the power to decide what’s good. The conventional wisdom says a thing is good because I choose it: a flavor of salad dressing, a course of study, a style of craft beer, a sexual partner or lack thereof. What matters to most of us is not actually what we choose, but that we get to make a choice.

The problem is, having more options doesn’t help us much when there is a correct answer. It’s really freaking hard to figure out when there is one -- of course asiago caesar and a quality breakfast stout are clear, objective goods, but there are other questions where the right choice is a little murkier.

This seems to be one of those questions, at first glance. There are lots of things I could say that wouldn’t exactly be wrong, anyway. Teacher. Friend. Leader. Storyteller. Companion. These are all good answers. But they aren’t the right answer. Without something like Saint Peter’s answer, or Saint Paul’s answer, or Saint John’s answer -- “him through whom all things came to be, and without whom nothing came to be” (John 1:3) -- or Saint Luke’s answer -- “him in whom we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) -- none of the rest of it holds any water.

There’s a fair bit of tension in this, as there is in all things that matter. My freedom does matter, and my answer probably ought to be different from my neighbor’s -- that’s where the diversity comes from, and that’s what makes the church so strong and beautiful -- but there are certain non-negotiables. Adding more choices when there’s a right one strikes me as the sort of thing Screwtape would recommend to muddy the waters and increase the likelihood of choosing wrong in the end.

My answer doesn’t have to be new, it just has to be both mine and correct. And so I stand with Simon, and Saul, and John, and Luke -- not bad company, I might point out, even if they did all end up getting killed or exiled or both -- in saying that you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God (Matthew 16:16), my reason for getting out of bed in the morning, and the one who shows me what it actually means to be a human.