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(The following was written for one of our church’s writing groups.) 

When it became time to begin putting down on paper those thoughts that had been occupying my mind ever since I heard about this writing group, I found myself suddenly stumped.

Then I looked down and saw two sad eyes staring back at me. It was my dog.

Now, my dog looks like a dog, smells like a dog, acts like a dog and does dog stuff. So I guess that makes him a pretty good dog. As a person, however, he sucks; he looks like a dog, smells like a dog, acts like a dog and does dog stuff — probably a lot like some people we all know.

It is important, however, to keep the two species separate. I like my dog a lot better than I like some people, and some people like my dog a lot better than they like me. Sort of a status quo, which I am more than willing to accept.

Unlike my cat whose been with me for 17 years, my dog is pretty new — not quite a year and a half. When we first met, he was a sad little five month puppy with a badly broken leg and no place to call home. Since then he has become my hero. “Bogey”, so named because of his sad-looking Humphrey Bogart eyes.

I had barely become accustomed to life at Camp “AlandGail” when I became a very sick man. Repercussions from a heart attack a year before had left me literally breathless. Weak, depressed and unable to continue working I had one foot in the basket case.

Bogey would consistently lift me out of my mental basement simply by needing me. He needed to be walked, he needed to be fed, he needed to be laughed at when he did silly puppy things. He was the straw that mended the camel’s back. Having Bogey in my life forced me to stop wallowing in self-pity and begin embracing a new life style.  After several months of testing, diagnosing and finally surgical procedures I was well enough to begin walking.  As my endurance increased so did my outlook on life. I re-learned the forgotten art of smiling and saying “good morning” to passersby. Those things I had taken for granted for almost fifty years became new again. Flowers, grass, rain, birds, even bugs and pricker bushes became targets for contemplation.

God works in mysterious ways. It’s not the first time he has given me extraordinary things. By dog does extraordinary things, but all he wants from me is to love him, sort of like someone else I know.

The last day of November.
A subtle shift has been taking place inside me this Fall. I have taken to heart the words I wrote on the “Try Again” post a while back.

I have spent a great deal of my life worrying about having people like me, and it has been exhausting and crippling. It’s not like I’m now going out of my way to aggravate people. There’s just an awareness that I have spent way too much energy in my life concerned about what others think of me, and there has been an inappripriate inner punishment of myself when I look like I might fall short. There is a realization that this is not what God desires for me. It is not what Jesus modelled for me.

I am feeling stronger. I’ve been exercising, enjoying the sensation of a stronger body which connects to a sense of a stronger, sturdier sense of internal will.

A follow up on this past Sunday’s sermon: Our text came from the end of the 18th chapter of the Gospel of John, where Jesus stands as a prisoner before Pilate. In the background are the religous leaders who have arrested Jesus and seek now for Pilate, the Roman, to condemn Jesus to death.

Pilate and the religious authorities are two extreme positions easily identifiable in our age:

The religious authorities represent fundamentalism in all its forms (Christian, Moslem, etc.) In their view, Jesus, with his unorthodox theology and his challenge to their oppressive authority, must be silenced.

Pilate represents the cynical atheism, nihilism, hedonism of our age that doubts there is such a thing as truth. “What is truth?” he asks Jesus, with resigned despair. Perhaps he has been driven to this position in part by the transparency of the fundamentalists’ hypocricy, who demand the silencing of Jesus supposedly for the sake of “truth”, when it is obvious to Pilate that they are merely out to protect their own power and privilege. “If these guys represent belief in God, there must not be much to it.”

It is my aspiration and hope that our church can provide a middle path between fundamentalism and cynical atheism. We know that God is real, and we know the need to connect to this God. We know this God is greater than our belief systems — an awesome mystery that cannot be reduced to a neat and tidy book of rules explaining everything. We believe this God is most clearly revealed in the person of Jesus. It seems to me that fundamentalists put more attention on Jesus as an abstract concept — “the only son of God whose death paid the price for our sins” — than they do the actual practical truths that this man’s life and death embodied: Love, forgiveness, authenticity (as opposed to the duplicity of the scribes and pharisees), humility (consider Jesus’ story of the taxcollector and the pharisee in the temple) and the simple truth that every single person is precious to God, with an inherent dignity that should not be oppressed.

There really is such a thing as TRUTH, but generally speaking it is not the truth of doctrine but rather the truth of values we are called to live out. The great mystery that is God who gave us this life cares for these kinds of emobodied truths and, I suspect, is often repulsed by our doctrines.

In certain ways it would make fundraising and membership growth a lot easier if we could tell convenient lies that make our church indispensable to people’s eternal salvation, i.e., that if you don’t worship here and give generously here you are going to hell.  But it would not be the truth. And Jesus makes it very clear in our passage that he and truth are best buddies.  You can’t tell a lie in the name of Jesus.

Strongest Dad in the World

 [From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]  

 I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans.  Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

 Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.

 Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

 And what has Rick done for his father? Not much–except save his life.

 This love story began in Winchester , Mass. , 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

  “He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life;” Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an institution.”

 But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate.  “No way,” Dick says he was told.  “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”

 ”Tell him a joke,” Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

 Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words?  “Go Bruins!” And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school  organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out,   “Dad, I want to do that.”

 Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says.  “I was sore for two weeks.”

 That day changed Rick’s life.  “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”

 And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon. 

   “No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially:  In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

 Then somebody said,  “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”

 How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.

 Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii . It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?

 Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own?  “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

 This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon , in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time’? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992–only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of  these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

 ”No question about it,” Rick types.  “My dad is the Father of the Century.”

 And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race.  Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.”

 So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

 Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland , Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.

 That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

 ”The thing I’d most like,” Rick types,  “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.”

 Here’s the video…. (DON’T MISS THE VIDEO!)

It is Black Friday and I am feeling pretty good. The particular significance of this for me is that traditionally this coming month has been my worst season of the year. I know that there are many people who share this sentiment, but I also know there are lots of people who love this time of year, and that my distaste for the season has been something of a downer for them.  For this I apologize.

How is it that I have come to dislike Christmas?  There are a number of reasons that come to mind.

1) In this hemisphere, this is literally the darkest time of the year. The winter solstice occurs on December 21^st, marking the longest night of the year.  As I mentioned in my post on “Pondering Light”, I really respond to light, and mourn its absence when it’s no longer there.  The darkness of this time of year seems to invite hibernation: a time for being still, sitting beside a fire place, going inward and pondering what life is all about.  All of this, of course, resonates nicely with the spiritual meanings of Advent.  But the culture seems to demand precisely the opposite: Get busy; go out into the malls and participate in the frantic rush, the noise, the fight over parking spaces.

2) There is a part of me that really longs for the simple life.  My pantheon of heroes include Francis of Assisi and Henry David Thoreau, not to mention Jesus of Nazareth. The pursuit of more and more stuff, which often seems to be one of the defining marks of our culture, has always struck me to be a dead end street. Once again, the story at the heart of Christmas resonates with the yearning for simplicity — Jesus is born in a stable with poor shepherds as his first visitors, and there in the midst of such simplicity is found great joy.   But our nation’s economy seems to require that at this time of year we all run up the credit cards to get more and more stuff.   As a parent I have felt the pressure to make sure there is lots of stuff under the tree for my kids simply because every other kid in middle class America will find plenty of presents under the tree, and I don’t want them to feel neglected.  I watch as the stuff gets unwrapped and generally speaking, within a short time it is discarded.  And so as I succumb to the materialistic frenzy, I end up feeling like I’ve become disconnected from some of my core values, which for me is a pretty lost feeling.

3) Christmas often ends up feeling like a long check-off list of tasks to get done — that if I don’t get these tasks done I am some sort of social malcontent (which I probably am.)  This means pressure. Christmas eve ends up feeling like a finish line through which to collapse exhausted.

4) There is another level of pressure that I feel as “pastor.”  I am aware that it is my role in the community to remind everybody “of the true meaning of Christmas” — to provide spiritual experiences. This responsibility can feel weighty indeed.

5) Finally,  the truest and most personal level of my discontent is probably this:  I have a a shortage of good and happy memories to draw upon that are associated with this time of year. My family of origin wasn’t especially close, and we didn’t have cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents who came together at Christmas to shower love.  My parents got divorced when I was going into 7^th grade, and thereafter Christmas

became a time that accentuated the absence of the family intimacy and harmony that others seemed to so enjoy (though I realize that often times those families had their own dark side, hidden from view.)  

Consequently, I have a long history of negative associations to counteract at this time of year.  If I did have all those happy childhood Christmas memories of shared family love, I would probably not mind at all the shopping — the long “to do” lists. In fact, I suspect, I would find them enjoyable.

But, as I said as I began this post, today is Black Friday and I’m feeling okay.  My life truly is showered with love, though often I have missed it.

And maybe along with those many other persons who begrudge the coming of this time of year, we can give one another a bit of encouragement and creep up to the manger together to peer into the face of the light that has come into the world.

Come, Lord Jesus.

One new entry into my pantheon of heroes is a preacher I recently heard about named Rev. Carlton Pearson. (You can hear his story told on the radio program, “This American Life” www.thislife.org) Carlton was the rising star of the American Pentecostal movement, an African American dear to the heart of Oral Roberts who a couple of years back had grown a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma that packed in 5000 congregants on a Sunday, a unique blend of Black and White together.

Then one day Carlton experienced God speaking directly to him while he was watching the nightly news. He beheld images of starving, disease-ridden Moslems, adults and children in Africa. Along with the compassion he felt towards their suffering, Carlton felt anger towards God. After a lifetime of suffering like this, how can You then funnel these poor, sad people into the eternal torments of hell? This was the traditional teaching he had learned and passed on about God: that those who did not accept the Gospel of Jesus Christ were doomed by God to hell for eternity.

Carlton heard God clearly speaking to him. No, you’ve gotten my Gospel wrong. I consign no one to hell. The only hell is the one human beings create on this earth in the ways you treat one another.

Searching the Scriptures, Carlton found ample passages that supported this point of view; where Jesus’ saving death on the cross is described as having accomplished salvation for all people, not just for some people. Yes, there were other passages that contradicted this notion, which led Carlton to see that “the inerrancy of Scripture” simply wasn’t an accurate doctrine.  He recognized that much of what the church had been preaching for so long was designed to manipulate people, getting them to fill the pews of churches and fill the offering plates with money.

Carlton began preaching a radical Gospel of inclusion in Jesus Christ, and that there is no hell, and suddenly he became a pariah in the American Pentecostal/fundamentalist fellowship, condemned as a heretic by the very persons who had once praised him. (Interesting footnote: Rev. Ted Haggard, an old seminary friend of Carlton’s was one of the person’s who condemned Carlton’s new preaching. See my November 3^rd blog, “On Eternal Torture Chambers.”) Carlton’s assistant pastors resigned, and his congregation dwindled down to 200 faithful members. Unable to make mortgage payments, they were evicted from the big church building that had been built to hold the 5000 who had once come to worship.

The congregation began worshipping in the afternoons in a downtown Episcopal Church, and once more began to grow, more truly inclusive than ever, with many gay and lesbian persons among the congregation, heartened by the message that heaven might well have a place for them. The numbers have not, nor are they likely to, approach the kinds of numbers Carlton once enjoyed. But Carlton feels a freedom in Christ he had not known before.

Here’s what I believe regarding such matters.

First, when we’re talking about what happens to us after death, we speak of a great mystery that demands great humility on our part.  I love old Thomas Aquinas’ words late in his life after he had some sort of direct, mystical encounter with God: all the words he had written (and he had written a lot of them as the greatest of all medieval theologians) “were just so much straw”, and he refused to write any more thereafter.  Better not to speak rather than to speak of things of which we really don’t know what we’re talking about.

Nonetheless, I plunge ahead.

Second, in regard to Scripture, whether we acknowledge it or not, all of us who call ourselves “Christian” emphasize certain scripture passages above others. We choose certain passages to become the key by which we interpret the rest of the Bible. Even people who claim “the inerrancy of Scripture“, (that every verse in the Bible is God’s inspired Word, exactly the way God wants it, so don‘t question it,) choose to give certain passages more authority than others.

So the question becomes: why did I choose certain passages to have more authority for me than others? It seems to me that self-examination will lead in a couple of possible directions:

First, I chose to exalt certain passages because I was told to do so by authority figures I trusted unquestioningly.

Second, I made my choices because these verses reinforce certain positions I already have, and are advantageous to me in regards to where I find myself in life (as in, it makes me one of the “saved”, certainly a superior class of person in contrast to those who are “damned”. )

The third possibility that occurs to me, which is often difficult to distinguish from the other two, is that inwardly we sense God speaking more clearly in these verses — like Carlton, it rings true in the depths of our souls.

For me, two passages that I exalt above others are stories Jesus told: the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25 – 37), where the man who asked what must I do to inherit eternal life? is told, in essence, go forth and practice compassion, with a particular emphasis on compassion on those who are different from yourself. The other story is that of the Good Shepherd (Luke 15:3 – 7) who seeks out the one lost sheep “until he finds it”, bringing it home on his shoulders, throwing a great party to celebrate the lost being found.

From these stories there are two things I trust to be true.

One, that compassion of heart and action is far more important than belief. The best way to prepare for our deaths is by living our lives as a journey of compassion, in which, despite our many stumblings — or perhaps because of our many stumblings —  we grow in our capacity to live compassionately towards others, and towards ourselves.

And two, God will eventually find every lost sheep. The story doesn’t say “if he finds it”, Jesus said “when he finds it.” In the end, God will have God’s way with us, bringing us into the great party that is heaven. 

What all this means in regards to what takes place after death, only God knows for sure. What makes sense to me is that the experience of standing in the presence of the extraordinary light and love of God will have an excruciatingly painful aspect to it: a sense of shame regarding all that came forth from us that wasn’t worthy of the love of God that gave us this life in the first place.  It makes sense to me that some people would, in the moment of their death, chose to turn away from this great love, creating a hell of their own making.  In the moment of death I believe we are required to give up a lot of stuff we’ve been mightily attached to during our lifetimes: our pride, anger, resentments, fear, self-righteousness and other inaccurate self-images of ourselves.  And maybe we decide on some level of our being that we’re not going to any party where we aren’t allowed to bring that stuff with us.

But still the shepherd searches, which I suspect means the search can continue beyond death. I hold onto this story when I hear about suicides. The person may have taken his or her own life in great despair and deep darkness, lost in the wilderness, but the good shepherd doesn’t give up on his beloved lamb. The search goes on, with a blessed conclusion ultimately guaranteed.

 

 

 

 

The poem by Thomas Transtromer that I read in my sermon this past week:

I got sleepy while driving and pulled in under a tree at the side of the road.
Rolled up in the back seat and went to sleep.
How long?
Hours.
Darkness had come.
All of a sudden I was awake, and didn’t know who I was.
I’m fully conscious, but that doesn’t help.
Where am I?
WHO am I?
I am something that has just woken up in a back seat, throwing itself around in panic like a cat in a gunnysack.
Who am I?
After a long while my life comes back to me.
My name comes to me like an angel.
Outside the castle walls there is a trumpet blast (as in the Leonora Overture) and the footsteps that will save me come quickly quickly down the long staircase.
It’s me coming!
It’s me!

But it is impossible to forget the fifteen-second battle in the hell of nothingness, a few feet from a major highway where the cars slip past with their lights dimmed.

Whither shall I go from your spirit? Or wither shall I flee from your presence?(from Psalm 139)

Dag Hammarskold: God does not die the day when we cease to believe in a personal (God), but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

Joan Chittister, in “There Is a Season”

Where shall I look for Enlightenment? the disciple asked.

Here, the elder said.

When will it happen? the disciple asked.

It is happening right now, the elder answered.

Then why don’t I experience it? the disciple persisted.

Because you do not look, the elder said.

But what should I look for? the disciple continued.

Nothing. Just look, the elder said.

But at what? the disciple asked again.

At anything your eyes alight upon, the elder answered.

But must I look in a special way? the disciple went on.

No. The ordinary way will do, the elder said.

But don’t I always look the ordinary way? the disciple said.

No, you don’t, the elder said.

But why ever not? The disciple asked.

Because to look you must be here. You’re mostly somewhere else, the elder said.

There is this license that comes with one’s birthday to be a bit more out there in terms of demanding some affirmation and attention. I made it a point yesterday to tell people, “Hey, it’s my birthday; wish me a ‘happy birthday.’”

I did my monthly preaching at the nursing home with the old women, and I told them right up front that it was my birthday, had them sing for me, then asked them each when their birthdays were.  Their eyes — they shone like the sun.  I went off on a riff regarding the wonder of the fact that all of us were birthed into this world not by mere chance but because God willed it to be so. God wanted us here! The party wouldn’t be complete without us. God said “Yes!” to each one of us, making us exactly who we are, genetically speaking, and God said it was good, very good. I revelled in the story of Jesus coming up out of the waters of the River Jordan and hearing the voice of the heavenly daddy say, “You are my child, with whom I am delighted.” Maybe before anything else God wants us to feel that delight in our bones.

I listened to some of the NPR program “Speaking of Faith”. This week’s theme is the spiritual meaning of depression. Parker Palmer referred to depression as being not the opposite of happiness, but of vitality and passion. We pursue happiness in this world when maybe we should be more concerned with vitality and passion.

Jesus had vitality and passion, that’s for sure. When he spoke, it wasn’t like the scribes who simply mimicked what they had heard. Jesus spoke out of his own God given depths, and the people couldn’t help but notice the difference.

Today is my birthday. 51 years ago I was born on a blustery day in Jackson, Mississippi. What a long, strange trip it’s been. It’s good to be here. Good to be alive. Very good. Now I can see if anybody is reading this. I expect to read a few “happy birthdays” in the comment section. (It’s my suspicion that there are some of you who haven’t figured out how to leave a comment. You click on the word “Comments” below, and a screen opens up where you can write something.)

Yesterday I went to another district clergy meeting. I arrived late and sat in the back as opening worship was going on. It was testimonial time, and people were standing up telling stories of good, surprising things that were happening in their church. I know that this is more me than them, but I experience it as a version of “Can you top this?” and I sit there feeling out of it, wishing I wasn’t there. This is old, old stuff for me, going back way before I became a minister.

The one story that I will remember from this sharing was Silas telling how, just before his church conference was about to begin, a 76 year old woman was hit by a car outside the church. She was lying on the street, apparently lifeless. The windshield of the car was broken from the impact of her body. Everyone was distraught, terrified. They cancelled the business meeting and held a prayer meeting for the woman instead. Amazingly, the woman survived with a few broken bones that will heal. She was resisting the pain medication they were giving her the day after because, she said, she felt no pain.

After testimonials, it was time for the guest speaker, a woman named Grace who is a pastor in Wisconsin and author and story teller. She is black and from Kenya, somewhat flamboyant and quite charming. What will stand out in my memory is that she brought along her husband, who is a science photographer, and not especially inclined towards the Church and Christianity, a part from the fact that he is married to a preacher. David’s parents are Danish and Welsh. He is pale, reserved, and apparently has a house in the wilderness of northern Scandanavia — a place where he loves to be. Grace had David show us slides of his photographs. He would speak for a time, and then she would speak. His photographs were wonderful. There was one that included the beautiful child they have together.

Grace was speaking about Advent, and how we live now out of a vision of the end. Her marriage, it seems to me, provides a sign of the final healing of this broken creation that God has in store for us. Two people from very different worlds coming together in a love that generates new life and wonderful new perspective on this world, not to mention hope. The preacher drawing inspiration from the secular science photographer and vice versa… The African and the Northern European, the flamboyant one and the reserved one, finding delight in one another.

The other things that stand out:

David focusing attention on the wonder of light in all its many subtleties. The photographer is dependent upon the light — must be willing to be led by the light.

He said that the subject of a picture should be off center; it is more interesting that way. The beautiful old sanctuary we met in had stained glass windows with classic images of Jesus the good shepherd and Jesus in Gethsemene. In both windows Jesus was smack in the center.

Grace told a story of when she first arrived at her church and an old pillar of the congregation told her on the first Sunday of worship as he passed her by, exiting the church, “I have two hearing aids and I wasn’t wearing them this morning and I don’t intend to wear them as long as you are here. I don’t have anything to learn from your kind. And by the way, your stole is crooked — fix it.” She described how devastated she felt, but she also described how the relationship was transfigured over time. Cued by God, Grace gave the old man the job of fixing her stole every Sunday morning before worship. Overtime she (and God) won him over. One year the old man presented her with a Christmas present, a sweatshirt he had purchased in March and held onto for nine months. It read, “Jesus loves you (but I’m his favorite!)” I assume he also puts his hearing aids back in now when she preachs.

At a break I was feeling my usual dis-ease at these gatherings, and then Renee, the new district superintendent came and sat with me for a few moments, expressing what seemed to be a genuine interest in me. I think that she, too, despite certain differences in perspective is winning me over as well.

Then my old friend Marcia, similarly ill at ease with the staid structures of the United Methodist Church, came and sat with me, and we enjoyed sharing our unconventional view on the Church. By the end of the break I was feeling connected, and pleased to be there.

We live in a culture that doesn’t put much value in fidelity, whether it be fidelity to marriage partners or to other relationships that make up our communal life. These days there is so much transience. People frequently change the community they live in, the jobs they work at, and generally speaking, the ultimate criteria is: where can they make the most money, or live in the biggest house? The relationships of the present are viewed as disposable in order to attain the bigger and better.

In the old days major league baseball teams would have players on their roster for their entire playing career, and there was fidelity between players and players, and fans and players.  Now the New York Yankees provide the model for teams to aspire to: overhaul the roster every year with the best players out there that money can buy. The Ma and Pa grocery is disappearing because they can’t sell their groceries at a price that competes with the big grocery chains. Ma and Pa’s fidelity to one another, to their customers, to their community doesn’t matter any more. In the end, all we will have are Wall Marts.