In Small Town USA, Little League opening day is always a major celebration with parades, ceremonies and speeches. When my son was growing up a highlight was always the benediction by the minister of my church in Darien CT– Rev. Ron Evans. I recently had the chance to ask Ron for a copy of the prayer and because it’s one of the loveliest things I’ve read about baseball, I thought I would share it now.
The Little League Prayer:
Almighty God, who made the earth in the shape of a ball so any and all might take joy in the playing of games, with great joy do we give Thee praise and cheers for all this and for the reason we gather on this sacred space today.
We ask Thy blessing on this sweet season of Spring and Summer sport.
Grateful are we for this grand celebration day, and all the days of games ahead on these fair fields and everywhere.
Thankful are we not only for these splendid facilities and special fields of dreams made into realities by the All Star efforts of so many to make this season possible for us; and we thank thee too for all who have worked to make our play not merely possible, but such a joy:
Committees, Town Officers, Sponsors, Keepers of the grounds,
Parents and Grandparents, Coaches, Refreshment Stand helpers,
Loyal spectators and supporters, and, ye Lord, all Clear-Visioned Umpires too!
We ask Thy blessing on all of these, that what we do for fun may aid the wholesome growth of all, and that it contribute only in the highest aims of sport, that will make only good sports of us all too.
So, may every game this season be well played; every pitch a strike; every swing a solid hit; every catch and tag an out.
Just as every player here is always an All-Star in Thy loving and sleepless sight.
And after this, and every inning, round at bat, and rounding of the bases, O God, see each of us safely home to our friends and families now, and eventually in thee.
So to this let us all gratefully add, AMEN and PLAY BALL…
The Reverend Doctor Ronald T. Evans, Senior Minister
Walking out of the San Juan, Puerto Rico airport into an atmosphere of perfectly temperatured summery air I muse to myself, “Hmm, this isn’t so bad.” It’s definitely an improvement over the snow-covered backyard I left behind in Connecticut. But even with the lovely weather, I still have a lingering anxiety about the next five days, which, because I’m on a service trip, are to be spent among strangers doing God knows what to serve humanity.
I always aspired to be the great humanitarian who would brave a foreign environment to make life a little bit better for a less advantaged community. Of course, being most skilled in the art of punching letters on a keyboard, I’m not exactly in a position to fix a cleft lip, engineer fresh drinking water, build a house, or instruct villagers how to improve their crop yields. Still, there must be something I can do.
And sure enough, by the time I return to the airport to fly home I will have:
Inhaled paint fumes and possibly even lead paint dust in the service of beautifying recycled picnic tables;
Slept in a bunk bed and survived a snoring roommate;
Endured four cold showers;
Wandered outside in the middle of the night to locate a bathroom while hoping that the armed guard wouldn’t mistake me for an intruder and mow me down;
Demolished my careful, health-focused diet regimen in favor of fried corn, fried wheat, fried rice, and salty processed snacks;
Fallen asleep in a fourth grade class;
Sampled multiple varieties of moonshine;
Took dozens of photos of beautiful sunsets and sunrises;
And laughed harder than I have in years.
Mariana Puerto Rico
Arriving in Puerto Rico in mid-March, I am headed to the hurricane-impaired mountainous village of Mariana. Mariana is best known for its annual breadfruit festival, although the whole time we are there none of us actually sees a breadfruit. The town itself is poor and elderly, whose residents largely worked in the pharmaceutical factories at the base of the mountain in the city of Humacao — until they closed.
When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017, it hit Mariana first, wrecking havoc with the local power and water systems. When my church wanted to raise funds to “help Puerto Rico” and searched for a worthy recipient, we were impressed that when faced with municipal and federal indifference, Mariana’s local mutual aid organization had jumped into action to prepare and serve hundreds of meals a day, reestablish some electricity, and erect a water purification system. (See video below for the compelling narrative.)
I was proud that our church raised $14,000 for Mariana but in the back of my mind, couldn’t help but wonder if this was really a good use of the money. So when the international humanitarian agency Crossing Thresholds began taking volunteers down there to support that same village, I signed up.
On this trip there would be five women and two men, including the organizer Rusty Pedersen, the former owner of an outdoor adventure company and a long-time leader of service trips in Central America. I quickly come to understand that there’s a whole population of people whose idea of a great vacation is to fly to a remote under-developed country, sleep on cots, and dig toilets. Many of the women on the trip have traveled with Rusty before and they fondly tell war stories of lousy food, intestinal problems, and scary reptiles in Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic and Nigeria. All I can offer was that I had been to Norwalk, CT to hand out frozen turkeys in a food pantry.
On the ride from the airport to Mariana I was surprised to see that Puerto Rico itself is not as physically devastated as I was expecting. A lot of work has gone into repairing the most obvious damage. Downed trees have been removed and roofs repaired. Power and water have been restored virtually everywhere. The lingering effects are harder to see externally, especially for a island that was already relatively poor to start with. In fact, the worst effects may be what you can’t see: that so many former residents left the island after the Hurricane and never returned. (And just to be clear, these observations only reflect what I saw with my own eyes and are not meant to associate myself with the U.S. President’s budget proposals.)
The Center for Community Transformation
This disused school is rapidly being converted into a community center
The objective of our trip is to help the people of Mariana convert an abandoned school into a community center. The newly named “Center for Community Transformation” will be both our workplace and home, since we are eating in the former cafeteria and sleeping in two former classrooms that have been converted into gender-separated dorm rooms, each with ten bunk beds, which, I discover, my church paid for.
I slept in that bunk bed and enjoyed Happy Hour on those couches
Considering that the facility was abandoned for years and then assaulted by Hurricane Maria, it’s in remarkably good shape now. The people of Mariana and the volunteers who came before us did an enormous amount of work of cleaning and restoring it to working order. It’s debris-free, well-landscaped, and freshly planted. There’s a beautiful room serving as a children’s library and another room with eight washing machines and driers that will be a community laundromat. A refrigerator, stove, and sink have been moved back into the former cafeteria, which now serves as a large all-purpose dining and meeting room. There are also incubator rooms set aside for local small businesses start-ups.
Eventually the people of Mariana want this facility to become the heart of the village, and already, even before it’s officially open, the Center is hosting yoga classes and a health clinic, while providing space for aspiring social workers.
The kitchen and dinning area of the main community room
Knowing that I wanted to learn how our church’s donation had been spent, the Center’s director Francisco Nieves sat down with me to review the receipts from Wal-Mart, Ikea and other local stores where they had bought tables, bunk beds, couches, office equipment, and other items with the money donated by our congregation. The level of transparency and accountability is very impressive.
Not everything is running smoothly, though. Almost comically, at one time or another every toilet is either shut down or overflowing, which I discover one morning at 3:30 a.m. And the Center is powered primarily by a generator that feeds a night-time battery until solar panels arrive to replace the ones that were stolen a few weeks ago.
Mornings
Once we settle into the Center, the rhythm of the days becomes clear. Because of my chronic sleeping problems I am invariably the first of the volunteers to rise, sometimes as early as 5:00. Given how many snorers were in our party, Rusty had handed out earplugs like there were ecstasy tablets at a rave. But the snoring wasn’t the real problem, it was avian sounds — the roosters and other birds crowing and tweeting at the sunrise — that roused me so early.
Since all the common rooms are locked at this time of day I usually struggled to catch up on mainland news via my smartphone and the island’s spotty Internet connections, or, more satisfyingly, read quietly under a bathroom light until breakfast. At other times I played the aging hippie and just watched the sun rise — and what a sight. Puerto Rico is so beautiful that it’s hard not to snap photos as soon as the early morning starts appearing on the horizon.
A Puerto Rican sunrise
Mornings were for manual labor, although a couple of the women inventoried and organized the supplies and planted new landscaping. The rest of us were on painting duty. This included nine tables that had been built by a previous volunteer team out of recycled doors as well as the new doors that replaced them. But before the tables could be painted, someone needed to sand off several generations of paint.
“That’s a man’s job,” the women agreed, so I ended up using a power sander to remove as much paint off as I could. That’s damn hard work, by the way.
By about Day Two we agreed that any really difficult physical labor — moving the tables outside, for example — could be left for the next mission trip, a group of 16 college kids coming in from CUNY Lehman. Let them risk the hernias, we decided.
Prepping the tables for painting
The women in the group decided that a Jackson Pollock theme would work best on these tables.
Afternoons
I hate to admit it, but after a morning of physical labor, I was spent almost every day. Thankfully, the afternoons were usually designated for educational opportunities, which is how I ended up in a fourth-grade class observing vocabulary enrichment lessons.
Alas the lessons were in Spanish, and after a morning of hard work I was drowsy. And wouldn’t you know it, some kid caught me dozing, giving me a big smile when I snapped awake, accompanied by that universal sleeping sign of a head resting on two clasped hands.
The community’s elementary school, where almost all the students are economically disadvantaged.
We also met leaders of the mutual aid group (Communal Recreational and Educational Association of Mariana, or ARECMA — see more info at this link) that runs both the center and the mountaintop park that served meals after the hurricane. We also met representatives of the educational non-profit that Crossing Thresholds is supporting.
The meetings with these agencies were my least favorite part of the trip, to be honest. Like public and semi-public officials everywhere, our interlocutors wanted to assure us that everything was going great with their organizations. Outwardly friendly, they could also be opaque, especially when faced with direct questions. And the people in our group, who were experts in child and senior issues, had many many questions, as well as opinions and suggestions about how things could be done. I couldn’t tell whether the nodding agency officials were being polite or actually interested in the river of ideas we were proposing.
Evenings
Evenings came early on this trip; not because the sun went down early, because it didn’t, but because once the work, educational, and napping responsibilities were over, it was time for a brief and invigorating cold shower, followed by happy hour, which convened daily in the men’s dorm room. Alcohol can obviously be a destructive element in many people’s lives, but in our group it became a serious source of bonding, stripping away most uptight inhibitions and stimulating some hilarious storytelling.
Dinner came early too — starting at 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. One night we attended a movie about the Mariana recovery effort that was, to our bemusement, in un-subtitled Spanish, meaning that none of could understand the narration. No one complained, though, because we were at top of the mountain surrounded by one of the most beautiful sunsets ever witnessed.
One night we had dinner at the top of the mountain
One night we stayed late at dinner because we wanted to give baby gifts to a pregnant ARECMA employer who was working with the group and had been adopted by us as everyone’s favorite kid sister. On another night, a birthday cake emerged and as we were singing “Happy Birthday” it transpired that the happy birthday wishes were for ME, even though my birthday had been more than two weeks earlier. This resulted in a embarrassing stumbling speech from the stunned birthday boy, who couldn’t think of a thing to say.
With no television or radio and spotless Internet connections, we debated how to pass the time on nights with no activities on the agenda. We tried to think of games that would amuse us, but as they say, the journey itself became the destination and we talked so much about how to entertain ourselves that we never did play any of those games.
And that was just as well, because people started moseying off to bed at 9:00. I usually managed to hold off until 10:00, falling asleep almost immediately. I didn’t sleep long, but when I was asleep I was asleep.
Nutrition
Our cooks
For most of my life I acted like good nutrition was for wimps. Lately I have turned over a new leaf, renouncing processed food, bread, juice, sugar, cured meats and other Big Food poisons. All that went out the window on this trip. I even drank a can of Pepsi. Yes, I could have announced dietary restrictions like some of the women on the trip, but out of a combination of politeness, machismo, and gluttony, I gobbled down everything that was put in front of me.
Our meals were prepared by three lovely Mariana ladies who might or might not have worked in the cafeteria of the old school we were transforming into the community center. I never did get the answer to this. They doted on us like grandmothers, although it’s possible we were as old, or even older, than they were.
These women eased us into Puerto Rican fare, like those deep-sea divers who have to be slowly brought to the surface to avoid the bends. Our first dinner was spaghetti, sauteed hamburger, and tomato sauce, accompanied by lettuce greens and bottled salad dressing — a meal that my mother had served many times in the early 1960s. Our first breakfast was a selection of boxed cereals, pancakes, fruit salad, and white bread that we could toast.
But as the days went on the meals became increasingly interesting. Both lunch and dinner were major meals — chicken, pork chops, fish, steak, tasty fried fritters made in a variety of shapes and sizes from a variety of grains. And of course salads, rice and beans. All of this could be accented with a selection of hot sauces and washed down with water or cans of soda. All of this was delicious.
And once the staff warmed up to us, the bottles of moonshine came out. More than once I heard the story of how at every Christmas there would be a steady stream of police officers headed up to the illegal stills in the Mariana mountains to procure their own holiday hooch.
It would be rude not to sample, right? And it was tasty so why not? I had always assumed that the Pappy-produced moonshine in “L’il Abner” tasted like turpentine but in Mariana, at least, it’s fruit flavored, marinated in coconut, pineapple, mango and other substances to mask the fact that it’s usually more than 100-proof.
Was it worth it?
The most common refrain from people who return from mission trips is, “I got more out of it than I gave.” By that they usually mean they got the psychic rewards of doing a good deed and feeling good about themselves, while also becoming more grateful for their immensely privileged life back in these United States.
When you’re doing unskilled labor and not literally changing lives through medical care or advanced engineering, it’s harder to measure your impact. Your contribution can seem like less than a drop in the ocean. And even if you are the doctor who restores sight to a hundred kids, you have to wonder in your moments of existential despair, so what? Those children will still grow up poor in a corrupt system that’s stacked against them.
And yet even though my efforts were infinitesimally small compared to the poverty in Mariana, never mind all of Puerto Rico or even the world, I did return with a sense of satisfaction. Not self-satisfaction because I know how much is left undone. But I did feel part of a steady stream of service workers, including those who came before and those who will come after, who are quickly bringing this project to life.
Could I have mailed a check for the cost of the trip so that ARECMA could have hired a local worker to do what I worked on more efficiently? Absolutely. But would I have mailed that check without personally seeing what was going on there? Almost certainly not.
There’s one other point that needs to be made. The dirty little secret of the trip is that despite the cold showers, disrupted sleep, and hard physical labor, it was fun. My co-workers were a blast and Puerto Rico was beautiful. It was not a standard vacation but it had all the elements of an adventure trip.
Gardens earned a poor reputation in the Bible. The two worst betrayals in history occur in Gardens. Humankind betrays God in the Garden of Eden and Judas betrays Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. So if a cynic were to write a hymn he’d call it, “Stay Out of the Garden.”
Fortunately Austin Miles, who wrote “In the Garden,” was no cynic. A pharmacist yes, but a cynic no. Miles later claimed that a vision inspired him to write this song as he sat at his desk with his Bible open to John Chapter 20. In this vision he witnessed the weeping Magdalene being comforted by the resurrected Savior. As soon as he awoke he wrote the lyrics fast — as quickly as they could be put down on paper, and exactly as they appear in the hymnal. Later that night he wrote the music.
Sometimes I wonder if Alan Miles was fully aware of the song he’d written. He would not be the first creator to misinterpret his own creation. Because when I read John 20, I get a sense of happiness and joy. This is the moment when Christianity begins.
But “In the Garden” the hymn is a not a happy song. The music sounds like a sad slow waltz and the words have a wistful elegiac quality to them. Here’s the final verse: “I’d stay in the garden with him, though the night around me be falling, but he bids me go, through the voice of woe, His voice to me is calling.” These regretful lyrics signal the end of something, not the beginning of a movement that would transform the world.
The reason “In the Garden” is meaningful to me is because it’s traditionally sung at our family’s funerals. I first became aware how powerful it could be after my grandmother died. My mother had arranged for a soloist to sing it from the balcony at the rear of the church and when she sang the chorus “and He walked with me and He talked with me and He told me I am his own” my cousins and their kids began — one by one — to weep.
We also sang this at my Aunt Lee’s funeral and later at my Uncle Wayne’s. As many of you know, my father died over the Christmas vacation. Before he went into the hospital he handed over a set of funeral instructions that, unbeknownst to us, he had been preparing over the course of several years. And sure enough, he asked that we sing “In the Garden” at his funeral. And we did.
I think “In the Garden” is popular at funerals because it offers a different kind of comfort than the kind provided to Mary Magdalene, and that the garden is a different kind of garden than we see in John.
To me the garden represents heaven, and in the first verse, when we sing, “I come to the Garden alone,” we are coming to see God. We have fought the good fight, we have finished the race, we have kept the faith. It is time for rest, it is time for God to tell us we are His own.
“In the Garden” seems like a farewell song, mixing optimism and sadness simultaneously. The hymn was written to comfort and I do find it comforting that someday we’ll be welcomed into paradise and have a personal conversation with God in the heavenly garden. I imagine a conversation where we tell Him our story, our concerns, and where we fell short. He’ll already know all this, of course, but He’ll listen like an attentive father.
This interpretation is very different from the one Austin Miles intended, but over the years it’s how I’ve come to relate to the hymn. In a way, it’s emblematic of how a hymn operates – making its meaning known after a lifetime of listening and singing. But regardless of what Austin Miles intended, I’m grateful for hymn because it’s brought me comfort and hope at some of the saddest times of my life.
Really!!? 