On Friday evening, four Sisters went to Wade Stadium to watch the Duluth Huskies play the St. Cloud Rox. Despite a rally in the 6th inning Duluth lost, but it was a beautiful evening to be at the ball park, with just enough wind to moderate the warm evening air.
We sat above the first base line. Beyond the outfield, ore docks and cranes, a line of thunderstorms over Wisconsin built up to dizzying heights and slowly slid eastward to rain on the Upper Peninsula. At sunset the clouds caught the red light long after dusk had fallen on the field below.
It is good to get away from the monastery and rub shoulders with other baseball fans, to be caught up in the slow rhythm of the Game of Summer, eating brats and peanuts, cheering for each strike and roaring at each run. Life isn’t all formal prayer and work, ora et labora. Enjoying the company of others and cheering for the home team is itself a kind of prayer: the prayer of gratefully living this one precious life during the fleeting Minnesota summer.
Hunter Thompson famously said, “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!” How easy it is to forget that life is an adventure, when we fail to look beyond the work immediately in front of us!
So I give thanks to God for the small adventures of the game: for the shrill cheers from a little girl in the stands who has no idea what baseball is but responds with her whole being to the excitement; for the old man with Parkinson’s symptoms sitting behind home base, remembering other games from his youth; for the young men on the field who play for love of the game; for the storm passing silently into the distance; for night drawing its cloak over a beautiful Duluth evening.
What a ride! Thanks be to God!
Photos by Sister Lisa Maurer