Hoop Dreams, Believing

I was 13 at the time that this all started. My youth and its accompanying energy abounded as I bounced my rubber ball on an outdoor tarmac court, new to the game and new to the introspection that being there would give me in life. When school was out I felt compelled to practice, to dribble and imagine my opponents confounded expressions as I effortlessly evaded their attempts to contain me. I would jump and feel time slow down as the ball made its way from my fingertips towards its ultimate goal. God makes us for things and I had hope that my lanky frame had special reasons for being a smaller proportioned version of the college kids I would watch on TV.

Then I was 16 and the reason I was practicing alone was because I’d played past the point that everyone else wanted to – I’d regress into that old form of imagination I’d developed in my first teenage year. I’d have the ball and shoot it from 25 feet away thinking as it arced its way down “she loves me, she loves me not” and wait for the inevitable: my victory over odds, a perfect concoction of love and basketball. I skipped lunch on schooldays because my dreams were enough sustenance.

All that time, all those dreams.

By the time I am 28 I know my dreams were about something else. My Achilles tear is two years past and although I can still play other things go wrong. Competitive play seems to always lead to some form of injury so I relegate myself to simple practice; shooting around like I did when I first learned the game. When I get to a court and allow myself to drift into the past it’s amusing because I can’t connect what hope that teenager had with my current state except to bemoan feeling old. I can’t help but do it anyway – it’s my best time of Introverted Thinking.

I’m 34 now writing after an evening spent absent mindedly shooting around on an empty basketball court when I’ve put the pieces together in an act of deliberate distraction the way Archimedes did when he was soaking in the tub before shouting eureka. I’m not shouting but the clarity with which things make sense is like the warmth of a car in the sun after a cold day. The irony is this: 21 years of playing alone has given me the coping mechanism with which I can think the daughter I lost. It’s the one place I can let physicality offload my reasoned thinking and memory, shifting my mind into the sort of cruise control of repetitive motion and exercise. If God made us for things so trivial as a game like basketball, He wasn’t thinking as I was of the ability to make the kind of undeniable beauty the gifted evoke; He was evolving the companion He would give me for the grief I’d live with when I was no longer young

So I shoot the basketball and think about belief and about how we conceptualize the act of believing. In the dark corner of spacetime that I occupy, what do I believe about religion, afterlife, and my daughter Lael? Will I see her again?

Within the tradition of Protestantism I’ve grown up in there are the devotees of Swiss theologian John Calvin who propound a great theme of God’s sovereignty and choice: that He knows we can never choose holiness (turning from sin, redemption from the bad through the death of Christ) and as an act of His own grace selects those who will realize their sin and inability to desire Him. Do I believe I will see her again in a Christianized conceptualization of heaven, I wonder, because I can’t accept alternatives as an act of divine will?

A good Calvinist¹ would nod and find themselves opening their Bible back to passages that comfort them in the book of Romans, psychologically accosting themselves for the evil they harbor and feeling all the better for realizing their Total Depravity because doing so gives them more gratitude when they consider God’s act of grace in saving them, in making believers of them.

Swish. Clang.

I’m chasing the ball back and forth allowing a crescendo of play to coincide with the feeling stirred up in my heart. I think of how, like my old dreams, the intellectual arguments for belief used to be so real to me. They mean nothing to me now in my present state. It would be like my meeting the girl I had a crush on when I was 13 and playing basketball for the first time now that I’m in my middle thirties: we’d look at each other, bemused at how time, weight, and life have made of us creatures we couldn’t imagine as youngsters. The past is relevant only in that we knew each other and that’s why we recognize our present day selves.

I was reading earlier this week about Mother Teresa and what some call a crisis of belief. She wrote once to a confidant:

"Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see,—Listen and do not hear—the tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak ... I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have [a] free hand."

To another:

“So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul.”

Yet she continued her work. Yet she continued her public profession of faith. I understand what for her was little to do with feeling and everything to do with the grit of a personal choice because I now find myself doing the same thing: deciding my belief in the absence of emotion and reason. She wasn’t always like that; before starting her work in Indian slums she felt witness to direct encounters with Jesus, both vivid and concrete. But that was before forgotten people, poverty, and most importantly death took hold of her life as her ministry took her to these states of being which most “normal” people take care to avoid².

I wonder if it isn’t because death under some circumstances, although natural, defies our sensibility in a way that removes our old friends of emotion and reason a place in ordering our world. There’s the distant and vague death that we can accept and there’s the death that leaves us bereft of all that we can care for like the old Ukrainian man we see crying at his wife’s grave each day.

As the crescendo unravels and I feel my body getting tired – the shots I make are all short because I’m no longer using my legs to help with the energy to project the ball towards the hoop. I’ve got to do one more thing before I leave. From 35 feet away I take a few dribbles and then shoot saying in my heart “she loves me, she loves me not” – she no longer a vague woman of my destiny but instead my daughter Lael to whom any worthwhile effort of mine I now dedicate.

Swish.

I’m almost done but there’s a new part to the ritual of leaving. One more shot, same spot, this time my heart whispering “she hears me, she hears me not.”

The ball goes into the basket with a resonating thud from the back of the rim and I can go home.

¹Ironically neither was Calvin a “Calvinist” nor was Luther a “Lutheran.”  More here.
²Mother Teresa has many critics. I find telling the difference between how each responded to seeing trauma and suffering. Perhaps her most vocal critic, Christopher Hitchens, wrote the following after seeing chaos in northern Uganda:

“I… tried not to notice the hundreds of other eyes that were hungrily turned toward me in the darkness, wondered what the hell the actual politicians, here or there, were doing… , and managed to get out of the night encampment just before the equatorial rains hit and washed most of the tents and groundsheets away.”