For God's Sake

I spent last week in Barcelona with my family. On the flight home I thought about what I should write about, what was worth posting, worth trying to describe. It was a precious, happy time with my family, especially given how rarely the five of us are together. But the subject of this post is not my family, but rather a crazy, commanding structure that I explored with my family not long after we arrived.

The Sagrada Familia resembles a cathedral that has been microwaved (desciptor borrowed from a friend). Its rust-colored spires seem almost collapsed, like long balloons slowly deflating. A somewhat depressing description, but it's impossible to articulate it properly. Having seen Notre Dame de Paris and St. Paul's in London and various other cathedrals scattered around Europe, a glance at Sagrada Familia is rather violent. It is so different as to be somewhat otherworldly. And I suppose that is the point.


Gaudi (Sagrada's architect) was heavily influenced by nature and that's evident in the structure. Comparatively, Notre Dame de Paris feels un-natural, not-of-the-earth, elements that aid the feeling of transcendence anyone would experience walking through its nave. The light shines through Notre Dame and it feels like God himself is wrapping his fingers around the buttresses, lifting them heavenward.


Sagrada is different. There is transcendence to be sure. But it is rooted in Creation and crowned with Christ's story, told in the facades wrapping the exterior of the building. The interior columns' design was inspired by trees and Gaudi desired a vision of treetops, a celestial forest, within the walls of the church. The light shines in very specifically, as Gaudi felt that too much or too little light disturbed the spiritual experience. You need enough light to feel God's touch, not so much that you are blinded to what He shows you. Even being inside now, so stark and unfinished, the light pouring in seemed perfect and unobtrusive. It was that ideal level of shine and shimmer, with just enough shadow to calm.


Throughout the structure there are elements of Earth. Birds, lizards, turtles, water, leaves, flowers, vines, fruit. The other cathedrals I've visited (and loved) seemed distinctly unworldy, on purpose perhaps given the directive that we be in the world but not of the world. It's a powerful separation with such sacred places, sliding you safely into a place fit for worship, protected from the world's temptations and terrors. But I found the Sagrada's earth-inspired body to be significantly more powerful. To glorify God inspired by the Creation he gave seems so much more tangible and translatable. I can touch a tree, smell a flower, dig my fingers into dirt. I cannot build the Sagrada but I can sit at the foot of some trunk and look heavenward and sigh. The Sagrada, miraculously, creates a space of holiness and reverence while maintaining a connection to the dirt it covers.


Perhaps it moved me more because I love the Earth, too. Value it physically as well as spiritually. I do not take lightly God's order that we are the stewards of this planet, that it is a gift we are meant to treasure and cherish and use. Its resources are our own, but we are not meant to rape those resources with no eye toward the future. Our stewardship is meant to be intelligent. Prosperous but not ignorant of the ramifications of our actions. So a church reaching heavenward with tree-inspired columns, spires resting on carvings of turtles, it simply makes sense to me. We take so much of this planet for granted, assuming its resources are unremarkable or undiminishing. If we treasured those resources, that dirt, that water, that oil, that coal, that salt, those diamonds, those trees, those mountains, that river, those fisheries, with the same love and specificity gifted by the Creator, I imagine our relationship with the earth would be quite different today.


If we walked through the world the way we walk through the corridor of a cathedral, light pouring in and wrapping 'round tree trunks, we would, at the very least, hesitate before lifting the axe.

The Wheels on the Bus

I've recently started taking the bus to work again after spending a good year among the intrepid (crazy?) population who treks from Minneapolis to St. Paul and back every workday. The drive would be passable but for 1) bad weather and 2) construction. As winter and spring take up the first problem and summer and fall take up the second, that really leaves very few days to make the 25 mile roundtrip drive worthwhile. And, to quote a friend who will remain nameless, I'm a "hippie," and reducing my carbon footprint is really just part of my job.

I have two main bus drivers on the route I take, gentlemen of exceedingly different personalities who see me near 6 am on the trek into St. Paul, and 4 pm on the trek home. I don't know their names. The gentleman in the morning always says hello, he smiles and thanks me when I wish him a happy day upon his dropping me off downtown, and he welcomes me back when I miss a morning or two due to travel or oversleeping. He often gives a lift to a fellow driver who's headed home after his shift and they laugh and smile at one another as good friends do. He waves at other drivers on the road. I even saw him blow a kiss to another bus driver, a bubbly-looking woman with her hair in a ribboned ponytail, who we drove past at a light on Nicollet. He smiles the way some people do, the way you know that smiles are their most common facial movement.

The gentleman in the afternoon clearly hates his job. He stares straight ahead, never says hello. He's much younger than my morning driver, and wears sunglasses even on the cloudiest day. Everyday when he drops me off I wish him a good day. I thank him. He has never acknowledged me. But I may have found my "in" for getting an occasional hello from the man...

Evidently if you fall down the steps of his bus and land, hard, on the sidewalk with your farmer's market potatoes rolling out of your "Virginia is for Lovers" bag, he will not just drive away in his sunglassed, mopey world. He will jump down the stairs and exclaim, "Holy shit, lady, are you alright?" I really was fine and potatoes are totally edible when bruised, so it could have been worse. He actually gave me a smile and a "you have a nice day" when I stood up. Public embarrassment inspires kindness, I suppose. I do not plan on making a habit of falling off his bus so hopefully cordiality from here on out will not require injury. I'm all for reducing my carbon footprint but I hadn't factored in bruising as a possible result of that pursuit.

Baseball

There are few things more holy to a summer than a baseball game. I attended my first Twins game recently at the widely heralded (deservedly) brand spanking new Target Field. While I remain firm in my belief, rooted in a childhood dedicated to the Cardinals and their Arkansas farm team, that the National League is far superior to the "fake baseball" attempted by the AL, I can give credit where credit is due for a good game. I attended with a fellow baseball-lover (I should say "fake baseball"-lover since he's a Twins fan but since he provided the tickets, I'll overlook that flaw) and I don't think there's anything better on a sunny afternoon than a mild tshirt-shaped sunburn, good company, and a homerun to cheer for.

I bought a scorecard as soon as we entered and enjoyed relearning all the chickenscratches my Dad taught me as a girl. There's a certain satisfaction from that backwards K (called strikeout) and the filled in black diamond of a homerun. I also like the 6-4-3 of the double play. My favorite position in softball was shortstop, and I liked owning that "6."

On Saturday I'm headed to a Saints game, the minor league team in St. Paul that boasts $5 tickets, burn-your-ass metal bleachers, and a pig mascot that runs around the field at will. It's very different from the major league experience, but honestly, save a Cardinals game in my former hometown, I much prefer the minor league feel. It reminds me more of the first baseball games of growing up, the ones spent at Ray Winderfield Field (only a handful of people will notice that childish mistake), hot dogs and mosquitos, crowd cheering for Geronimoooooooo Pennnnnna. Those are the games that spell B-A-S-E-B-A-L-L in my heart. The Saints games remind me of those hot, Arkansas evenings, even if the Minnesota sun is significantly kinder than those Southern scorchers.

I think, too, that a baseball fan is simply more my sort of human than other sports fans. Football can be fun to watch, and I admit to getting jazzed for New Orleans this past February. But my affection for football is fleeting, and only emotionally tied to the handful of my kid brother's games I caught while he was in high school. I've never cared about basketball (an apathy born of one miserable season spent "playing" basketball in middle school when I would sob for an hour before practice because I loathed it so much).

Baseball. Now that is a sport worth loving. A slow one at times, to be sure, steeped in decades and decades of history, generations of rivalries, old wounds, underdogs, and the smell of dirt and chalk and soft, sweaty leather. Baseball fans are fervent but they're also patient. Football is over in a blink, barely a dozen games to sink your teeth into. Baseball requires weeks, months of dedication. An exhaustion of sweeps and death spirals, records to break, pulled tendons, perfect games, rainouts, games ahead, games behind. I respect that slowness. And I respect the fan that settles in for the long haul in April, the promise of sun and a homerun peeking through springtime's clouds.

Mid-July is prime baseball season. Squinting against the glare, the near-scream of joy for the nearly-fair nearly-homerun, the smell of bug spray and beer and mustard. It's a specific slice of the year, before the smell of autumn creeps across the grass and forces the acknowledgment of other seasons. I love that slow creep of darkness, when the outfield lights buzz on, love the sugary promise of cotton candy, and the way my ponytail dissolves in a cascade of sweaty strings after I jump up too many times to cheer. I just love it.

Swing away!