Ninety feet between bases is the nearest to perfection that man has yet achieved.

(Red Smith)

Two years ago at the Canadian Learneds at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, I gave a paper entitled “The Emergence of Born-Again Sport” in which I examined Athletes-In-Action, one of the Evangelical Christian organizations catering to professional and elite amateur athletes. I ended the paper with a brief discussion of the relationship between religion and sport and in the process identified three positions. First, sport and religion can be viewed as being totally different realities; for philosopher Robert J. Higgs sport belongs to the world of the beautiful and play, whereas religion by nature belongs to the holy and the spiritual.¹ A second position, clearly articulated by theologian Michael Novak, claims that sport is religion-like: “It flows from a deep natural impulse that is radically religious.”² But for Novak the religiosity of sport is somehow inferior to the religiosity experienced in an organized religion like Christianity. A third position suggests that sport can be a form of religion in every sense of the term. Charles Prebisch, a Religious Studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has adopted this position. For Prebisch, on occasion, and under the right circumstances, sport can bring its advocates to an experience of the ultimate.³ In my paper I agreed with Prebisch, although I felt somewhat vulnerable in doing so.⁴ Subsequently, I discovered the writings of W. P. Kinsella on baseball, and these have helped me to explore more methodically how sport can be a doorway to the sacred.

Who is W. P. Kinsella? At the moment Kinsella is rapidly becoming Canada's most popular writer of fiction. Over the past ten years he has published nine collections of short stories and two widely acclaimed novels, Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. In spite of his productiveness he remains outside the Canadian literary establishment, partly because he writes about Indians and baseball, but mainly because Bill Kinsella relishes being anti-establishment. Kinsella has won many awards, including the Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Canadian Author's Prize for Fiction, and in 1987, the prestigious Leacock Medal for humour. A testimony to the respect and interest that Kinsella has engendered is a recent scholarly critique of his fiction by University of Saskatchewan English professor Donald Murray, The Fiction of W. P. Kinsella: Tall Tales in Various Voices.⁵ And Field of Dreams, a Hollywood-produced film based on an adaptation of his novel Shoeless Joe, has drawn rave reviews.

Kinsella's rise to fame has not been sudden or easy. Born and raised near Edmonton, Kinsella dropped out of school at age 17 and spent almost two decades in a variety of non-descript occupations such as cab driver, claims' investigator and pizza parlour proprietor. The financial success of this last endeavour enabled him to pursue his life-long dream of becoming a writer. In 1970 at age 35 he enrolled in the University of Victoria's creative writing program. He graduated in 1974 and two years later was accepted into the University of Iowa's prestigious MFA program in creative writing. In 1978, with degree in hand and a new wife, his third, Kinsella accepted a teaching position at the University of Calgary. For Kinsella this was not a good experience. He loathed academia, calling the University of Calgary “Desolate U.” and his first-year remedial English classes “Bonehead English.” In 1982, with the publication of Shoeless Joe, Kinsella finally had the economic security to write full time, so he moved to White Rock, B.C., thirty miles south of Vancouver on the American border, a place he claims has the warmest climate in Canada. From White Rock he has maintained a rigorous work schedule, publishing one or two works a year. For leisure, he and his wife Annie travel the Major League Baseball circuit in their beat-up Nissan pick-up.

In general Kinsella's writing reflects many Canadian concerns. Like George Grant, Kinsella is horrified by the effects that our technocratic society, burgeoning like an octopus, is having on individuals. Writes literary critic Elspeth Cameron: “Evil, according to Kinsella, lies in the institutions that run our lives: organized religion, banks, bureaucracies, military service, schools.”⁶ Kinsella's books of Indian stories—Dance Me Outside, The Moccasin Telegraph and The Fencepost Chronicles—acutely portray the destructiveness of the white, technocratic culture that dominates North America. What Kinsella prefers is the gentle rural life where people have time for themselves, for others and for pastimes like baseball. This perhaps explains his love of Iowa, which remains the quintessential farm-based culture in North America. Ray Kinsella, the central character in Shoeless Joe, rhapsodizes about the benefits of rural Iowa over the big city:

I came to Iowa to study, one of thousands of faceless students who pass through large universities, but I fell in love with the state. Fell in love with the land, the people, the sky, the cornfields, and Annie. …

For years I bathed each morning, frosted my cheeks with Aqua Velva, donned a three piece suit and a snap brim hat, and, feeling like Superman emerging from a telephone booth, set forth to save the world from a lack of life insurance. I loathed the job so much that I did it quickly, urgently, almost violently. It was Annie who got me to rent the farm. It was Annie who got me to buy it.⁷

Kinsella is well aware of the dark forces present in our technological society, but he is no cynic. All his characters reflect a naive optimism that we are not totally powerless, that the tragedy of life can be transcended.

Kinsella has had a passion for baseball since an early age. His father was a semi-pro ball player who was full of baseball tales and took young Bill to see minor league professional games in Edmonton. However, Kinsella confesses that he was never much of a baseball player himself. In fact, he claims that baseball is the only sport he likes and patronizes. As he says in an interview with Donald Murray:

I myself am not an outdoors person; I'm not a hiker or a swimmer or a camper. You couldn't pay me enough money to camp—I like motels—if I don't have a hot shower in the morning I'm mean and ornery for the whole day. The only outdoors I really like is the baseball stadium.⁸

What is it about baseball that Kinsella finds so appealing? He continually stresses that he simply wants to tell a good story; his purpose, he says, is to entertain and to stimulate the imagination of the reader. However, he does recognize that “for those who prefer to seek below the surface for meaning, there are symbols, ironies, Biblical and mythological tales retold.”⁹ In the Murray interview Kinsella specified the deeper meaning of his baseball stories:

Well, I think we do need heroes, and there is a terrible lack of heroes … baseball, if not individually, then at least collectively provides the hero. The players become larger than life because the baseball field is not enclosed, as are the football field and the basketball court. Baseball, while the stadiums do have fences, still retains a mythic proportion since the game has a sort of infinite dimension: there's no distance that the slugger cannot theoretically surpass, that the fielder cannot theoretically cover—almost with enough agility and cunning. I seems to me that baseball is the hero that we worship rather than the individual players who make up the game.¹⁰

It is, then, the mythical element in Kinsella's baseball stories that conveys his religious vision and offers some insight into how sport can be a doorway to the sacred. To break open his religious vision I would like to appeal to the work of the great American mythologist Joseph Campbell. In his ground-breaking work The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell identifies what he calls a monomyth, a paradigm of myth that is repeated over and over again in a thousand faces and a thousand contexts. This monomyth involves a sequence of three phases—departure, initiation and return. To quote Campbell:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men.¹¹

As Campbell himself notes, this paradigm originated with the prior work of Arnold Van Gennep, the great Flemish anthropologist. Van Gennep was the first researcher to note the centrality of rites of passage amongst the practices of all traditional peoples. For Van Gennep rites of passage such as birth, initiation, marriage and death always follow a sequence of rites of separation, rites of liminality (learning) and rites of reincorporation. In traditional cultures rites of passage enabled people to move successfully from one stage of their life to another.¹² For Campbell myth precedes ritual; the story of the hero is what ritual attempts to replicate. The monomyth Campbell identifies is for him a paradigm for all spiritual transformation and is therefore the basis for all organized expressions of religion. Moses, the Buddha, Jesus, the Prophet, all underwent the journey of the legendary hero and their challenge to their devotees is to follow the same path.

But this monomyth underlies the process of fundamental change in all other areas of life. Campbell refers to Arnold Toynbee's theory of world history which suggests that great societies are created or re-created only when a large body of their citizenry has undergone a profound spiritual transition which leads to a new vision of society.¹³ (This is perhaps what is happening in China today.) The monomyth can also be found at the heart of progress in scientific thought. As Thomas Kuhn has pointed out in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the modern world came into being only after scientists accepted the validity of the Copernican view of the universe and in the process discarded the old Ptolemaic view. For many this transition involved a painful intellectual journey.¹⁴

Campbell's monomyth can be clearly seen in the writings of W. P. Kinsella. When his three-phase monomyth is broken down into smaller stages and applied to Kinsella's writings, it can help us to see how baseball can be a source of personal transformation of how sport in general can be a sacred doorway.

DEPARTURE

1. OPENNESS TO ADVENTURE

For Campbell the legendary hero is always an adventurer at heart. He has the ability to wonder and to dream. And he has the courage to follow his dream. All of Kinsella's heroes exhibit an openness to adventure. As Gideon Clarke puts it in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy: “There are some of us who see and hear more than they were meant to. My father was one of those, as I am.”¹⁵

2. THE CALL TO ADVENTURE

According to Campbell the hero does not decide himself to embark on an adventure. Always he has a sense of being called by the gods or by fate to go off on a journey. The hero, furthermore, never knows what the final outcome of the adventure will be, although he will have his hopes. What he does know is that the journey is important and that he alone can take it. In The Iowa Baseball Confederacy Gideon inherits his father's obsession to prove to the world, in spite of the absence of any historical records to the contrary, that the 1907 World Series champions Chicago Cubs had actually played a team of amateur baseball All-Stars known as the Iowa Baseball Confederacy in his hometown of Onamata Iowa (known back then as Big Inning) in the summer of 1908. In his earlier novel Shoeless Joe, the call to hero Ray Kinsella is more direct:

Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robin's egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the veranda of my farm home in eastern Iowa, when a voice clearly said to me, “If you build it, he will come.”¹⁶

The voice is that of a baseball park announcer; the “it” to be built is a baseball field in the corn acreage in front of Ray's house; and the “he” who will come is Shoeless Joe Jackson—a childhood hero of Ray's father. Jackson was the star outfielder of the Chicago White Sox in 1919 when they lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Red Legs. A year later Jackson and seven of his teammates were suspended for life by Commissioner Kenesaw Landis for having taken bribes from Chicago gamblers to throw the World Series.

3. THE STRUGGLE TO DEPART

Campbell stresses that departure from the ordinary world is often a painful process for the legendary hero. For work, friends, family and social status all have to be left behind to pursue the deep sea journey to a higher realm of truth and transformation. Ray Kinsella and Gideon Clarke, the heroes in Shoeless Joe and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy are able to drop what they are doing in the ordinary world to pursue their fantasy, but other central characters find it particularly difficult to leave the security of the routines that characterize life in the ordinary world. This is particularly true of J. D. Salinger in Shoeless Joe. Yes, Kinsella makes J. D. Salinger a character in his novel. Ray Kinsella is told by the ghost announcer to “Ease his pain”; Ray knows intuitively that this order refers to author Salinger. Ray knows that Salinger has not written anything since 1965 and that he has been living as a recluse in upstate New Hampshire. So Ray travels to Salinger's retreat in his beat-up Nissan pick-up, kidnaps the author and takes him to a baseball game in Boston's Fenway Park between the Red Sox and Minnesota Twins. Years before Ray had read in an interview with Salinger in an obscure literary magazine that Salinger had been a devout baseball fan. Apparently his boyhood dream had been to play short-stop for the New York Giants, but he had been so devastated when the Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958, and when the Polo Grounds were later demolished in 1964, that he gave up his enthusiasm for baseball and had not attended a game since. During the drive to Boston Ray tells Salinger about the baseball field on his farm in Iowa and about the presence of the 1918 White Sox. Salinger says he admires Ray's craziness, but continually asks him: “Are you sure you're not under psychiatric care?”¹⁷ Salinger continues to claim that he is happy with his life the way it is because he cherishes privacy. But it is obvious that he is depressed by his aging and so has lost all enthusiasm for living. He is stuck in his boredom and anger, and at this point is not able to respond to Ray's call to adventure.

4. CROSSING THE FIRST THRESHOLD

According to Campbell, in order for the hero to cross the first threshold, he must believe that the adventure will lead to a positive climax. So he must take a leap of faith, and in taking that leap, a substantial change has already occurred. At the ball game in Fenway Park Ray shouts at Jerry, hoping to shake him out of his imprisonment to the past:

Open your eyes. I've come fifteen hundred miles to drag you to a baseball game. Stretch the skin back from your eyes. Take in everything. Look at Yaz there in the on-deck circle. Look at the angle he holds the bat. There isn't another player in the Majors can duplicate that stance. Look at the left field fence, half as high as the sky. The Green Monster … Watch the players, white against green, like froth on the waves of the ocean. Look around at the fans, count their warts, just as they count ours, look at them stuff their faces and cheer with their mouths full. We're not just ordinary people, we're a congregation. Baseball is a ceremony, a ritual as surely as sacrificing a goat beneath a full moon is ritual.¹⁸

At home after the game, Salinger cannot bring himself to say goodbye to Ray. The game has sewn a seed of renewal in him. He can now see what Ray can see and hear, including the scoreboard message “Go the distance.” So Jerry hops back into Ray's truck and they head for Chisholm, Minnesota, to find Moonlight Graham—a former ball player who appeared in only one game in the Majors. Salinger is now part of the adventure.

INITIATION

5. THE FIELD OF DREAMS

According to Campbell, when the hero is safely through the first threshold, he enters a dream-like landscape similar to the surrealist painting of Salvador Dali. Nothing is quite the same as in everyday life; there are strange creatures, objects with human characteristics and mysterious forces that constantly endanger the adventurer. In spite of the confusion and danger, however, the hero is mesmerized by the task at hand. In a short story entitled “Frank Pierce, Iowa,” Kinsella introduces readers to this surrealist, dream-like realm. Frank Pierce is a small Iowa farming village named after a former president of the United States. On a sunny afternoon in mid-August in 1901, all its inhabitants and buildings disappear from the face of the earth without any record of their former existence except in the folklore of the region. Ezra Dean, one of the former inhabitants foresaw this in a dream. He says to a friend as they stand at the edge of the town's baseball field:

Think of it, Jim. We'll be free of the weight that binds us to the earth. We'll soar like the wind, like the leaves of autumn; we'll soar like music. Instead of being the baseball players, we'll be the ball, the bat, the bases. Adventures like we've never known … I rode with Teddy Roosevelt in … what was the year? It will be greater that.¹⁹

6. ORDEAL BY FIRE

For Campbell the hero is constantly being tested in the initiation phase. And it is more and more evident that it is not just his own future that hangs in the balance, but the future of everything else. In Kinsella's stories it is the game per se that is the ordeal. The games always involve teams that are very even in talent, even though that might not be the case at the outset. So the competition is always intense and the outcome never certain. In The Iowa Baseball Confederacy the teams are so even that the game goes on for forty days and 2650 innings. And throughout the duration of this epic game, the playing conditions are impossible; rain all the time and a flood that threatens to drown the town of Big Inning and the baseball field itself. As well, the game has cosmic implications, for lurking behind the scene is the gigantic Indian, Drifting Away, who eventually tells Gideon Clarke that it is he who is helping the Confederacy All-Stars to stay competitive with the superior Chicago Cubs. For Drifting Away a victory by the All-Stars will be victory for all Native peoples in North America and will redress some of the wrong done to the Indians by the white man. But a victory for the All-Stars will also be a victory for Drifting Away personally. For long ago his young bride Onamata was murdered because of his negligence; consequently, the grandfathers (elders) consigned him to a life of drifting until the right occasion came along to vindicate himself. For Drifting Away the epic baseball game is the critical opportunity. Drifting Away makes it clear that baseball is the only thing that the white man has done right; for baseball has circles and not just squares and therefore is close to nature. Says Drifting Away:

Think of the circles instead of the lines … the ball, the circumference of the bat, the outfield running to the circle of the horizon, the batter running around the bases. Baseball is as close to the circle of perfection as white are allowed to the approach.²⁰

For Drifting Away, baseball is a metaphor for the ultimate nature of things. The game ritualizes a fundamental cosmic struggle. Victory in the game will not only restore Onamata to Drifting Away, hence bestowing on him peace and completeness, but it will also bring harmony and tranquility to the cosmos.

7. THE MEETING WITH THE GODDESS

The struggle, according to Campbell, does eventually bring its rewards. One of these is the meeting with the goddess who represents the navel of reality and therefore the source of life and energy. So in meeting the Goddess, the hero is re-energized, protected and taught compassion. For Kinsella the goddess is the land, and specifically the land of Iowa. It is this verdant farmland that nourishes the soul. And when baseball is played on this land, the way it should be played, under the blue skies with wooden bleachers and old-time hot dogs, magic occurs. The players and spectators feel liberated from life's pressures and are given a sense of rebirth. As Ray says to Jerry after watching some outstanding fielding in the Twins-Red Sox game at Fenway Park:

The play re-affirms what I already know … that baseball is the most perfect of games, solid, true, pure, precious as the diamonds. If only life were so simple … I feel as if I've escaped my skin, as if I left a dry shell of myself back in Iowa. My skin is so new and pink, and it feels raw to my touch, it's as if I peeled off a blister that covered my whole body. Within the baselines anything can happen; tides can reverse, oceans can open. That's why they say, “The game is never over, until the last man is out.” Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game.²¹

8. AT-ONE-MENT WITH THE FATHER

In the adventure, according to Campbell, the hero is eventually brought face to face with the Father, who represents truth or at least a full vision of truth. The hero now recognizes that all the testing has been administered by the father so as to test his manliness. Once these trials have been mastered, the hero shares his father's vision and is treated as an equal by the father.

In both of Kinsella's baseball novels the father-figure dominates the plot. In The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Gideon attempts to validate his father's claim about the existence of the Iowa Baseball Confederacy and the game between its All-Stars and the Chicago Cubs in 1908. In Shoeless Joe Ray's love for and knowledge of the game has been nurtured by his father, Johnny, a former minor league player. Johnny had contended to Ray that Shoeless Joe and the other seven players were really innocent victims of big-time gamblers. So Ray also has something to prove. Both fathers, Johnny Kinsella and Frank Clarke, die young, while their sons are in their teens. So the adventure ultimately leads to a reunion with their fathers. When Gideon and Ray have successfully met the test, when they have proved the existence of the phantom baseball league and the innocence of Shoeless Joe, then they are allowed to share their father's vision, which is that baseball is the nearest thing to perfection. Gideon relates the fathers' vision:

Why not baseball? My father would say, name a more perfect game with more possibilities for magic, wizardry, voodoo, hoodoo, enchantment, obsession. There's always time for day-dreaming, time to create your own illusions at the ballpark. I'll bet that there isn't a magician anywhere who doesn't love baseball. Take the layout. No mere mortal could have dreamed up the dimensions of a baseball field. No man could be that perfect. Abner Doubleday, if indeed he did invent the game, must have received divine guidance.²²

9. APOTHEOSIS

For Campbell, the hero who has been successfully initiated into the vision or the lore of the father is immediately given divine status and consequently enjoys a deep sense of bliss. What had not been complete before the adventure is now complete. The participants in Kinsella's baseball stories all become divine-like because they have had the opportunity to realize their dreams—to play in the Major Leagues successfully, and to play the game as it should be played, with keen competition and a freedom from everyday worries that normally lessen the pleasure of the game. Ultimately, all the players are lifted up to a different plane where they “feel free, unfettered and divine.” Stan, Gideon's co-adventurer in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, who had been a journeyman pro for twelve years, finally makes it to the big leagues, maintains a batting average over.300 and fields with great aplomb. Moonlight Graham, whom Ray has been called to bring to the baseball park on his farm, is given the chance to play with the White Sox and he too plays well. Both have found their heaven.

10. RECEIVING THE BOON

The culmination of this part of the adventure, according to Campbell, is that the hero receives a boon or divine gift, which entails the ability to share his vision with others. For Kinsella the boon is the unfettered love of baseball. So the adventurer-player is called to preach the good news of baseball. In Shoeless Joe Eddie Kid Scissons, whose life-long claims about having been a major leaguer are finally vindicated in Ray's ball field, in thankfulness goes up into the bleachers and preaches to all those present from many lifetimes:

I've read the word: I've played it, it is there. When you speak there's going to be a change in those around you. That is the living word of baseball … As I look at you, I know that there are men among you who are troubled, anxious, worried, insecure. What is the cure? Is it to be found in doctors, pills, medicine? No. The answer is in the word, and baseball is the word. We must tell everyone we meet the true meaning of the term baseball, and if we do, those we speak to will be changed by the power of that living word.²³

THE RETURN

11. THE REFUSAL TO RETURN

Campbell stresses that the hero must return to the real world or else the adventure ends. But the rapture of the ideal baseball games sometimes makes the hero reluctant to return. Ray in Shoeless Joe and Gideon and Stan in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy are all reluctant to return. Stan has done so well playing against the Cubs that their manager offers him a big league contract. Gideon has fallen in love with a local farm girl, Sarah Swan, who gives him the love and loyalty his wife Sunny has never given him. And Ray shows his reluctance by being jealous of J. D. Salinger who has been invited by Shoeless Joe to go beyond the fence after the game. He doesn't want to be left alone on his farm apart from his dream.

12. THE LAST THRESHOLD

For the last threshold to be negotiated successfully with a minimum of pain, the hero has to accept its finality. As Campbell stresses, the hero must accept the fact he cannot return to the idyllic world he has just experienced. Furthermore, according to Campbell, the hero now recognizes that his journey in another world has also in some sense been an adventure into himself. And what the hero has learned was always there to learn, but he did not have the ability or willingness to see this inner truth. Stan, Gideon's cohort in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, recognizes this. As they talk about returning, Gideon asks, “What about you?” Stan replies:

No, I have been what I always wanted to be. I'd have sold my soul to have been a major league ball player. I'd have done it, Gid. Chance offered me a contract. He says I could be a great hitter. Think about that … the terror of the league. A star … but I'm not going to do it. Gloria [Stan's wife] should have thrown me back in the lake years ago.²⁴

Stan now recognizes that his life has been as it should have been, and that it has been much more satisfying than he would have admitted before the baseball adventure. So he is now ready to get on with his life with a new appreciation of its worth.

13. REINCORPORATION

Campbell emphasizes that the hero must be reincorporated into ordinary life or no one will be able to hear his message. All of Kinsella's heroes are made to resume their ordinary lives. Gideon Clarke has to face the departure of Sunny from his life and the death of his adopted father, John Baron. Later, with the death of Marlyle Baron, he assumes responsibility for their middle-aged Down's Syndrome child, Missy. And Ray, in Shoeless Joe, has to return to the life of a corn farmer and somehow prevent the foreclosure of his farm. For all of Kinsella's heroes, reincorporation is painful, like coming back to work from a great summer vacation. But if they accept this necessity, Kinsella makes it clear that the experience of the adventure will linger on and continually reenergize their spirit. At the end of The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Gideon is walking with Missy along the road to town. They meet an Indian couple; the man is obviously a reincarnation or Drifting Away. Gideon can tell by the eyes. The woman is probably Onamata, meaning that they have been reunited, a symbol as well that all is now in harmony in the cosmos. Gideon says to the Indian, “You made it. Are you happy?” Drifting Away responds, “Sure we're happy, the old lady and me, gonna meet her brother in Onamata.” Gideon continues, “Haven't I seen you play baseball?” Drifting Away answers, “I haven't played in years and years. I only pinch hit one time.” So Gideon discovers back in ordinary life that his adventure was real and that it can never be taken away from him. He takes Missy's hand and continues down the road, saying to himself, “I'm so happy, I think I might explode.”²⁵

14. SHARING THE BOON

For Campbell the hero must be ordinary, but not too ordinary. His charisma needs to shine forth so that people might be moved towards a similar spiritual journey. In short, the boon must be shared or shown. In Shoeless Joe J. D. Salinger promises Ray he'll write about their adventure when he returns to ordinary life. And Gideon, in The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, says to Drifting Away that he'll see him again at the ball park, but this time he'll bring the Baseball Encyclopedia, the Bible of baseball. But it is in a more recent short story entitled “K-Mart” that Kinsella provides a clear image of how compelling the evangel of baseball can be.

The story involves three teenage male friends who have gone on to great success in adult life. They have not seen each other in twenty years, but they have met again at the funeral of a mutual female friend in their home town. After the funeral they reminisce about old times and especially about their endless baseball games. Their love of the game is quickly rekindled, so they decide to drive to the old ball park and play some baseball. Unfortunately, it is covered by a new K-Mart. Undaunted, they go inside and figure out where home plate, the pitcher's mound and center field were. Then they go to the sports section and help themselves to some ball, bats and mitts. After this, it's “Play Ball!”:

“Hit me a good one, Flash,” I held the bat high, gripped tight at the end. I held it straight up and down, peeking over the crook of my left elbow. Kaz pawed the cheap white tiles where the mound used to be. Far back in left Eddie drifted among the sofas and love seats. “Burn it there, Kaz,” he hollered, shielding his eyes with the glove, blocking out the glare of the imaginary sun. A few people were staring at us, warily, as they passed in nearby aisles. I wiggled the end of the bat and waited. As I did, the whiter light of K-Mart became the sunshine. The store lifted away from us like a bell-jar. The other players took their places on the field: tall slim Ted Troy at first base, Peppy Goselin at shortstop, Pudge Green in center field. As the players took shape, the racks of pink and blue dresses, the women's and children's clothes, fresh as sunshine, smelling of ironing and starch, rose like the mist. The grass was emerald green, measled with dandelions.

“Burn it in there,” Eddie shouted … There were two pinging sounds like a doorbell. Security to Section 12, Security to Section 12, said a female voice … Kaz wound up his thick arm and hamlike hand with grease-stained knuckles and snapped the ball toward me. … The ball was one laser of white connecting Kaz's hand with my bat. In the hairs-breath of a second between the crack of the bat and the ball exploding into the sun above the outfield, I relished the terrible joy of hitting it square on.²⁶

What, then, do Kinsella's musings about baseball tell us about the religiosity of sport? Campbell's monomyth applied to Kinsella's baseball stories shows that sport always has the potential to be a rite of passage for both the player and spectator. Certainly from ancient times to the present, sport has served as a way of testing the maturity of a young boy seeking admittance into adulthood. However, this is not the kind of rite of passage I am discussing here. My observation is that in the world of W. P. Kinsella, sport has the potential to lift the player and the spectator from the ordinary world to an extraordinary sacred world, and that the result of the apotheosis is always renewal or rebirth. In response to my concern outlined at the beginning of the paper, Kinsella appears to be suggesting that baseball or sport does not just offer experiences which are religion-like; rather, sport or baseball has the potential inherent in its nature to bestow experiences which are essentially religious, which are every bit as valid and real as those experiences one enjoys occasionally in organized religion.

If I am right about the religiosity of sport, or even partially right, then I think Kinsella's writings on baseball are an indictment of what sport has become in Canada in 1989, as typified by the world of Ben Johnson. The contrast between the two is striking. In Kinsella's world sport is always played for fun or as an end in itself; competing matters more than winning, and the players are not out to obliterate their opponents, but rather respect them and enjoy their camaraderie. Above all, Kinsella's players can play at their play because they have a sort of naive faith and trust in the ultimate goodness of things. So they have no trouble leaving behind everyday responsibilities without too much guilt or worry. The world of Ben Johnson, however, shows the darker side of sport. In this world, winning is everything, and if drugs, cheating or making oneself into a robot by years of trying to emulate the machine are needed to be Number One and to obliterate an opponent, then so be it. In the world of Ben Johnson, there is no faith or trust, so the purpose of sport is to gain as much power, wealth, and therefore as much security as possible. Such a world cannot really let go, let down its guard and play and have fun. Nor can anything be accepted as a gift. What the world of Ben Johnson has forgotten is Luther's warnings about salvation by works.

Kinsella's baseball stories also indict organized religion. Organized religion in pluralistic North America is still resolutely parochial. Today, in the mainline Christian churches that most of us belong to, we do grudgingly grant that God might be present with our Anglican, Roman Catholic and Baptist brothers and sisters, but not as perfectly as he is in our own denomination. And I even think that in most of our churches there is a growing minority that would concede that Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Bahai's and Native Animists might have some sort of pipe-line to the deity, even if it is less direct than our own. However, when it comes to seeing the sacred, present in so-called secular experiences, we have much more trouble. The only exception here would be work. Work is still a form of Godliness for Canadians, and so when it is threatened in any way, bishops, church leaders and TV evangelists spout fire on governments as if they were reincarnations of the eighth century Old Testament prophets. However, when sport or leisure is prostituted, there is hardly a whimper. There has been no bishop's statement about the Dubin Enquiry, nor has their been any outcry from church circles about the recent revelation in a cover article in Time magazine to the effect that we have ten fewer hours of leisure than we did twenty years ago, and that this lack of leisure is having destructive results on the stability of the family and our own individual well-being.

Kinsella's ideas about baseball, and therefore sport, challenge organized religions in North America to look more seriously at the tendency to compart-mentalize the spiritual journey. These stories challenge organized religions to take more seriously the claim of increasing numbers of North Americans that they are finding fulfillment, even spiritual transformation in mundane activities such as baseball. Perhaps the character Annie Savoy in the film Bull Durham has put this more directly:

I believe in the Church of Baseball. I've tried all the major religions and most of the minor ones. I've worshipped Buddha, Allah, Vishnu, Shiva, Tree Mushrooms, Isadore Duncan. I know things. For instance, there are 108 beads in a Catholic rosary, and there are 108 stitches in a baseball. When I learned that I gave Jesus a chance, but it just didn't work out between us. The Lord laid too much guilt on me. I prefer metaphysics to theology. You see there's no guilt in baseball, and it's never boring, which makes it like sex. … I've tried’em all, I really have. And the only Church that truly feeds the soul day in and day out is the Church of Baseball.²⁷

Notes

1. Robert J. Higgs, “Muscular Christianity, Holy Play and Spiritual Exercises: Confusion about Christ in Sports and Religion,” Journal of Sport Literature (Fall 1983).

2. Michael J. Novak, The Joy of Sport (New York: Basic Basics, 1976).

3. Charles Prebisch, “Heavenly Father, Divine Goalie: Sport and Religion,” The Antioch Review (Summer 1984).

4. Brian Aitken, “The Emergence of Born-Again Sport,” Canadian Studies in Religion (Fall 1989).

5. Donald Murray, The Fiction of W. P. Kinsella: Tall Tales in Various Voices (Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan Press, 1987).

6. Elspeth Cameron, “Diamonds are Forever,” Saturday Night (August 1986), 46.

7. W. P. Kinsella, Shoeless Joe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), 9.

8. Donald Murray, “Interview with W. P. Kinsella,” West Coast Review (April 1986), 63.

9. Murray, “Interview,” 61.

10. Murray, “Interview,” 65-66.

11. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), 36.

12. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

13. Campbell, “Hero,” 17.

14. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, ILL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

15. W. P. Kinsella, “Frank Pierce, Iowa,” The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988), 71.

16. Kinsella, “Shoeless,” 3.

17. Kinsella, “Shoeless,” 53.

18. Kinsella, “Shoeless,” 71.

19. W. P. Kinsella, “Frank Pierce, Iowa,” The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988), 71.

20. Kinsella, “Iowa,” 177-178.

21. Kinsella, “Iowa,” 78.

22. Kinsella, “Iowa,” 44.

23. Kinsella, “Shoeless,” 192-193.

24. Kinsella, “Iowa,” 292.

25. Kinsella, “Iowa,” 308-309.

26. W. P. Kinsella, “K-Mart,” The Further Adventures of Slugger McBatt (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988), 71.

27. Orion Pictures, (1988).