Welcome Back, Big Mac

"Grace under pressure" is a well-worn phrase, and I do not use it lightly. But those are the three words that come to mind when I recall Henry Aaron's pursuit of Babe Ruth's career homerun record.

In 1973, as Aaron approached the record, Newsweek ran a cover story on the racial insults he endured. As a 13-year-old white boy in a small northern town who had never interacted with African Americans, it was jarring to read of the torrent of abuse streaming into Hammerin' Hank's mailbox. To this day, I remember that one of letters began simply with the words "Dear Nigger" - as if Henry Aaron were not even a person, but just an embodiment of a perceived threat to white supremacy.

Aaron passed the Babe in April 1974 and added forty more homeruns before retiring. Today, at 76, he remains one of the game's greatest ambassadors.

This week, Aaron made news by affirming Mark McGwire's admission that he used performance-enhancing drugs as a player. In 1998, McGwire's pursuit of Roger Maris's single-season homerun record, with Sammy Sosa right behind, had thrilled the nation - and provided balm in baseball Gilead after the painful players' strike resulted in cancellation of the World Series in 1994.

McGwire retired under a steriods cloud in 2001 and fumbled his way awkwardly through a congressional hearing in 2005. This season, however, he's back in baseball, as the St. Louis Cardinal's hitting coach, hired by his former manager, Tony LaRussa.

In endorsing McGwire's conscience-clearing statement, Aaron used the language of forgiveness.

"[T]his is the most forgiving country in the world. If you come through and tell the truth, then you're going to be forgiven."

So Big Mac is back - and as Hammerin' Hank says, that's a good thing. More players should follow McGwire's lead and come clean about their own use of banned substances.

Number one on the in-need-of-confession list is of course the man who passed Aaron for the most career homeruns and McGwire for the most in a single season. Barry Bonds still faces charges of lying to a federal grand jury, after testifying in 2003 he never knowingly used steroids.

Aaron did not mention Bonds in his statement. Instead, he answered with humility and humor when reporters suggested that many people still refer to him as as the homerun king.

"Regardless of what happened, I'm not going to hit another home run. Not in this world. I may do it somewhere else. I don't think I can hit anybody deep. I think my deep is over with. The only thing I can hit is a golf ball — all over the place."

That's so true about golf. Indeed, Sam Snead told Ted Williams that it's harder than baseball, because you have to play your foul balls. But this is an apples and oranges comparison, because a golf ball doesn't come at you at nearly 100 mph, as a MLB fastball does.

Trinity Sunday, 2009

Before and after St. Augustine, great minds have struggled to comprehend and express the meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

As my St. Olaf classmate, Pastor Chris Smith, put it in his sermon last Sunday, none of the easy comparisons really cuts it. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are like water, to be found in a liquid, frozen or gaseous state Well, yeah − but that’s really not a very compelling image. Or they are like a shamrock: one stem, three leaves. Sure, but too too cute.

Far better to embrace the mystery: God, in God’s self, is a community, offering, in contemporary terms, the ultimate social networking experience. I’m glad to be in LinkedIn (thank you, Ed Dykhuizen), and my wife, Diane, really enjoys Facebook. Listening to my classmate’s Trinity Sunday sermon, however, it occurred to me that the linking experience that really matters is my baptism, which connects me to a God so great that it takes three persons to even begin to point to the reality behind the name.

The essence of that reality is love. A love so powerful that it is like the nuclear fusion at the heart of the sun.

Still, somehow, inexplicably, there is evil cast among us.

For millions of Christians, this is where William Paul Young’s novel The Shack comes in. A middle-aged man whose daughter was abducted and murdered years ago has a mystical healing encounter with the Trinity, and it’s full of surprises. God the Father as an African-American woman. The Holy Spirit as a hard-to-pin down, faintly Asian woman. And, most accessibly, Jesus − a regular guy at home in a carpenter’s shop and virtually anywhere else.

What is the result, in The Shack, of the protagonist’s encounter with these three persons? It is, in short, an experience of healing, not only for himself, but for his remaining family. Full forgiveness of the man who murdered his daughter is not yet forthcoming, but the sheer difficulty of that process is acknowledged, and that in itself, to a great degree, is freeing.