I love the game of baseball. Growing up it was my first favorite sport, and although I love pretty much any form of physical competition involving strategy, baseball has always had a primacy of place within my heart. Now that I have a son, I have passed the love of the game along to him, and I assist in coaching his teams.
In our community sports league, T-ball has no outs. Everyone gets a chance to hit three times, and everyone gets a chance to play the field 3 times. Then everyone goes home happy that they completed the tasks. While it is not always a game of beauty, it can certainly be something that is comical to watch if you have the patience for it. Because of the non-competitive nature of T-ball, the games serve as a year-long practice to get the kids used to the basic motions of the game of baseball which include swinging, fielding, and catching.
However as the kids graduate into Coach-Pitch, outs are calculated, strikeouts are recorded, and score is kept. Nuances of the game are taught and the kids are expected to start to think critically about in game decisions. The force play at a base is something that can be especially difficult to grasp. As a coaching staff, we began to inform our players that if you had the ball and beat a player who was running to a base, the runner would be out. Our players caught on quickly and started to be successful in getting the other team out. “Tag second,” or “Tag third,” became a frequent command from the coaches. However, we quickly found that our fielders would sometimes run to the nearest base with the ball regardless of whether there was anyone on base, at which as a coach you can only shake your head and smile amidst the frustration. The players, used to the success of the easy out, preferred to run and tag the nearest base rather than make the hard (and only) play of throwing the ball to first base.
This is where true coaching is necessary. The good coach has to realize that up to this point, they had done a good job getting the habits in place for their players to succeed, but now it is time to take them a step deeper in connecting the dots and understanding when they are supposed to use certain habits and why they are doing so. A lazy coach could do the easy thing and let the kids run to the nearest base everytime, and many outs would be recorded. But ultimately, if a coach wants to help form good baseball players, they have to persist through the growing pains of helping a young ball player think in a new way and be patient in mistakes. While it is a tougher road, the reward is so much greater than just letting the kids get outs randomly some of the time.
The same applies to the Catholic understanding of mass. In today’s world, those who go to mass generally know that they are supposed to go to mass. They are the ones who haven’t left the Church because they see the importance of weekly mass attendance – which is great! But sometimes those who go to mass are like the young baseball players running to any base with the ball, regardless of the amount of runners on base. They have a good habit, they just do not know how to use it well.
We as Catholics are to go to mass every Sunday to worship our God, not to check a box. We do so by bringing our previous week to God as a sacrifice to Him and receive blessing for the next week to come. Thus, it is the source and summit of the life of a Catholic. While we are imperfect people, God in His infinite grace and mercy in the mass allows us to join our imperfect sacrifice of our lives to Jesus’ perfect sacrifice of His life in the Eucharist. The mass is an offering of ourselves (individually and the whole community) through Him, with Him, and in Him. Thus, our week should be lived both flowing from mass and oriented to our next mass (and the eternal mass). However, most Catholics are often unaware of this and just go to mass as another thing to fit in their schedule and hopefully, they get some nice words from Father’s homily.
This is where the burden is on the Pastor, just like it was with a coach. The pastor can look at his flock and be happy that the few going to mass are doing something that so many in the culture are not doing. God will still work in their lives in certain ways, so why give the flock guidance? However, this would be doing an injustice to Catholics. It is the job of the Pastor to lead His flock to sainthood. Thus he needs to go through the growing pains of forming his flock to understand why they are doing what they are doing and then put it into practice. While it is the harder road, the result is a truly loving Christian community that loves God and thus loves other people. St. Augustine speaks about this, reminding shepherds of a christian flock that they should only be concerned with and do things for the eternal good of their flock regardless of the cost.
The goal of being Christian is to live life well, we only accomplish this by knowing our God and allowing Him to give us the grace that we need to do this. We find this grace in the sacraments, particularly in the mass. We need to be a people that not only goes to mass, but understands why we are doing it and applies that to our daily life. Because that is the difference between a ‘good person’ and a saint. The ‘good person’ has good habits, but does not always know how to use them, but the saint applies their good habits, or virtues, for the love of God and neighbor. God does not call us to be ‘good people,’ He calls us to be saints, which is a much better life.
