7 year old baseball wisdom
My daughter teaches me how to not get (overly) sucked in to our cultural myths.
My daughter and I are Cardinals fans. She started going out to the car with me in the morning in Ghana to listen last year (2005) if the Cardinals had beaten the Astros in the National League Championship. We would hear about a two sentence summary of the game. They finally lost that series. In the process I created a little baseball fan and bonded with my daughter. We went to two games in 2006 and watched the Cardinals go deep into the post season.
During the world series a couple days ago, she had gone to bed before the game was over. In the morning we went online to watch some of the big plays of the Cardinals win the night before. We watched for several minutes and I continued clicking around after we had exhausted the highlights and she looked at me and said, "Dad, you can read about it all day and all night but it is not going to make a difference."
Well said. Wisdom. Enough is enough.
Sports is certainly part of cultural metaphor. Walter Wink and then Paul Hiebert have claimed our fascination with sports in part is a replaying of Indo-European 'myth' or paradigm for our world view. Life is based on competition and battle. I wonder how often our big stories out of our Indo-European cultural heritage unknowingly enter into our mission. Our mission (also our church life, politics etc.) can take on story lines and themes from the cultural governing story (read myth) rather than that of the biblical story. See Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress, 1992). Paul Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Baker, 1994).
My daughter and I are Cardinals fans. She started going out to the car with me in the morning in Ghana to listen last year (2005) if the Cardinals had beaten the Astros in the National League Championship. We would hear about a two sentence summary of the game. They finally lost that series. In the process I created a little baseball fan and bonded with my daughter. We went to two games in 2006 and watched the Cardinals go deep into the post season.
During the world series a couple days ago, she had gone to bed before the game was over. In the morning we went online to watch some of the big plays of the Cardinals win the night before. We watched for several minutes and I continued clicking around after we had exhausted the highlights and she looked at me and said, "Dad, you can read about it all day and all night but it is not going to make a difference."
Well said. Wisdom. Enough is enough.
Sports is certainly part of cultural metaphor. Walter Wink and then Paul Hiebert have claimed our fascination with sports in part is a replaying of Indo-European 'myth' or paradigm for our world view. Life is based on competition and battle. I wonder how often our big stories out of our Indo-European cultural heritage unknowingly enter into our mission. Our mission (also our church life, politics etc.) can take on story lines and themes from the cultural governing story (read myth) rather than that of the biblical story. See Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Fortress, 1992). Paul Hiebert, Anthropological Reflections on Missiological Issues (Baker, 1994).
posted by Nathan Esala at 7:32 AM
1 Comments:
Africa and here in many ways seems like apples and oranges. Sometimes we do the same behavior for very different reasons. Certainly there is plenty of spin in Africa too and a tendency to be positive in public speech so as not to create negativity by your very speech itself (Performative speech). Success for us seems to be trying to get the right formula, and that improvement is possible through application of good ideas and hard work. Success stories prove the thesis true.
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