Jeeb-o-rama, baseball, and musings on religion in general

I guess it's appropriately inappropriate to heave a deep sigh of relief now that the bizarre spectacle that is Easter is over, and we can finally get on with the important business of spring, which largely consists of succumbing to the siren song of the New York Mets, who are putting together the most dominant start in their history. Sure, their 9-2 start and four game lead over the Great White Whale that for the last 13 years has been the Atlanta Braves is going to be sorely tested with an upcoming west coast road trip and home series with the Ogres of the Peachtree City. But one can still enjoy their early success, however fleeting, just as one can enjoy the tulips that flower for seemingly a day and a half before becoming sad, naked stems nestled among leaves that must sit there, looking forlorn, until they wither and can be pulled out to make room for the inevitable impatiens that are a requirement of New Jersey suburban life.

The beauty and ridiculousness of New York baseball fandom is that we think our teams should never, ever lose. On Sunday morning, after the Mets lost to Milwaukee on Saturday, the sports pundits were Monday morning quarterbacking the Kris Benson trade, wondering if maybe we should have gritted our teeth and put up with Anna Benson's wingnut rants and coochie dancing rather than endure Jorge Julio on the mound. But by Sunday night, Mrs. Benson had once again been relegated to the skank dustheap on which she belongs, thanks to the Mets fulfilling Willie Randolph's Saturday prediction that "tomorrow we start a new streak."

I myself spent much of yesterday wearing my copywriter hat (I'm always preparing for the layoffs that I hope will never happen) and writing scripts for Camille Abate's campaign ads before preparing a lovely dinner of Smithfield glazed ham, macaroni and cheese, and mixed vegetables sauteed with garlic and olive oil. (Every Jew/pagan ought to have a ham on Easter, don't you think?)

Mr. Brilliant, however, who puts even less credence in the Religions of the Fertile Crescent than I do, spent the day watching much of the Jeeb-o-rama that constitutes cable TV programming on Easter Sunday. There's only so much of that stuff I can stand, for all that A&E's Mysteries of the Bible series tries to take a scholarly approach to all things Biblical (and offers up that cute rabbi in the bargain). But while this series, and the many others like it, sustain a studied detachment when dealing with the Old Testament, as soon as the Stuff of Christianity comes on, all bets are off. One episode we watched last night, just before watching the Outing of Vito Spatafore on The Sopranos, dealt with the concept of Hell. You know that all pretenses of scholarliness have been dropped when a supposedly serious program about Christian doctrine shows clips from Angel on My Shoulder and calls it a factual portrayal of the reality of Hell.

Now, I've tried to look at Christianity and see if there maybe is something there that speaks to me. I figure, you can't do what I do relative to Christianity unless you've sat quietly and at least TRIED to let it into your heart. Believe me, I've done that. And every time, what I always come up with is "That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard."

If Christianity speaks to you, more power to you. It keeps you from doing things like reading about the Mayan Calendar and wondering, if the world is going to end on December 21, 2012, why on earth am I bothering to save for retirement? But for me it just doesn't work.

I got to thinking about Jesus yesterday in the context of former Phillies catcher Darren Daulton, of all people. Yesterday morning, we were watching Real Sports on HBO, which featured a segment on Whether Darren Daulton Is Crazy. As a player, Daulton was one of those handsome-in-a-dumbfuck-kind-of-way, firepluggy guys, with the most flattering mullet haircut of all time. Egotistical, but with the goods to back it up, he and Lenny Dykstra were the stocky Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the short-lived heyday of early 1990's Phillies baseball.

Daulton today believes he can time-travel, says that dark forces were propelling his second wife, Nicole, away from him, and claims to have had many out-of-body experiences:

"I didn't have my first out-of-body experience until I was 35," he says. Curiously, the epiphany occurred at one of baseball's holiest shrines -- Wrigley Field. "I hit a line-drive just inside the third base line to help win a game," he recalls. "The strange thing was I didn't hit that ball. I never hit balls inside the third base line!"

He left the ballpark in tears. "I told my wife, 'It wasn't me who swung that bat! It wasn't me!'" he says. "She thought I was Looney Tunes." She's not alone.

[snip]

Home alone in Tampa, Daulton spends much of his spare time typing up his mystical musings. The notes read like they were dictated by the True Believers who hitched a ride with Comet Hale-Bopp. "Reality is created and guarded by numeric patterns that overlap and awaken human consciousness, like a giant matrix or hologram," writes the .245 lifetime hitter. "They are created by sacred geometry -- numbers, the language of the universe, codes of awakening -- such as 11:11, which represent twin strands of DNA about to return to balance. Eleven equals BALANCE."

During the Dutch Enlightenment, No. 11 has been as significant as it was in Spinal Tap. "I'll wake up at night and look at the clock and it's 11:11," he says. "I'll turn on the TV and see a baseball game tied at 11 in the 11th inning. I'll look out the window and see a car passing with 1111 on the license plate. The car will turn into a driveway with 1111 on the mailbox."

Eventually, Daulton would like to compile these synchronicities in a book and call it If They Only Knew! He took the title from clubhouse banter of the 1993 Phillies, the National League pennant winners. "Some wild things happened on that team that the fans never heard about," he says. If they only knew! was the mantra of his wildest teammates, Lenny Dykstra and John Kruk.

The book would recount the day Daulton literally stepped through time. It would detail his ability to become a sort of otherworldly Willard Scott -- at times, he says, the weather changes with his moods. "At one point everyone was against me, kind of like I'd struck out with the bases loaded," he says. "Whenever my thoughts got totally negative, it would automatically rain."

If They Only Knew! would also reveal the secrets of the pyramids, which Daulton insists are strategically placed all over the galaxy: the moon, Mars...

Vegas?

"What goes above, also goes below," Daulton says, cryptically.

He believes the Mayan temples were built not by the Mayans, who were merely caretakers, but by a lost civilization. Possibly the Atlanteans, who allegedly disappeared beneath the waves. Possibly space aliens.

Daulton can ramble in mind-numbing detail about Dark Forces, the illusion of substance, the limitations of linear time. "The universe is made of vibrating energy," he says. "When energy vibrates fast enough on our 3-D plane, matter becomes invisible. Everything you see is vibrating at a certain level. A dirt clod, a rock..."

Even a rosin bag?

"Sure. A rosin bag is just a mirage of innumerable particles constantly speeding up or slowing down. But the Fourth and Fifth Dimensions remain unseen by most people. Their vibrations are at a lower frequency." Whether those vibrations are "good" is perhaps something only the Beach Boys can divine.

Earth, Daulton believes, is entering a quadrant of space in which the "vibrational energy" will increase dramatically. "The Mayan calendar stops at Dec. 21, 2012 -- the date the Mayans believed the world would end," he says. "On that day, at 11:11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, those who are ready to ascend will vanish from this plane of existence, like the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek."

Daulton hopes to beat the rush. "I can't wait to disappear," he says. "I'd disappear today if I could."

At first blush, one would be inclined to say that Daulton exhibits classic signs of schizophrenia -- the false perceptions, the hearing of voices, the false beliefs or misinterpretations of events and their significance without even considering other explanations, and preoccupations. When asked about mathematician John Nash, profiled in the film A Beautiful Mind, who WAS a diagnosed schizophrenic, Daulton insists that Nash is as normal as anyone else -- including himself, but that he just occupies a different plane of reality.

Now, I'm a lot more open to the possibilities of Stuff Out There That Can't Be Explained than most people, even if only because I'm not able to stuff my head into a nice little box labelled "Judaism" or "Christianity" or any other organized cosmology that tries to make sense of it all. But even I was inclined to think that Daulton is at this point a few French fries short of a Happy Meal.

I work in a mental health facility, and one of the many varied things I do is create web screen versions of case report forms for studies on Schizophrenia. So I spend eight or more hours a day in a place steeped in psychiatry and in medical/rational explanations for everything. And maybe Daulton IS manifesting some kind of adult-onset Schizophrenia.

Or maybe he isn't.

Because then I started thinking about Joshua of Nazareth and other prophets -- the highly charismatic people throughout history who have claimed to have connections with the divine. And it occurred to me that if Jesus were alive today, he would probably be carted off to a locked ward someplace and fed a whole bunch of Risperidone or some other anti-psychotic, and if he stopped talking about the only way to the Father is through him, maybe they'd let him out, but only if he promised to keep taking his meds.

So how do we KNOW that Darren Daulton is crazy? Because someone told us that his beliefs and behaviors are symptoms of a mental illness? And similarly, how do Christians KNOW that Jesus was in fact the literal son of God. Because someone told them so?

The fact of the matter is that we JUST DON'T KNOW. No one knows why we're here, or what happens to us after we die, because we aren't here to tell anyone. Mysteries of the Bible can run clips of old movies where Satan is Claude Rains in a suit and has an obviously gay sidekick and call it an accurate depiction of Hell, but we still don't know.

Christianity has dealt with these mysteries by branding those who have tried to explain them as somehow divinely inspired -- hence the Gospels (at least the ones that were allowed into the Christian canon) and the acceptance of Dante's Inferno as literal truth instead of fictional literature. But none of this changes the fact that we just don't know.

Some of us deal with it by choosing to believe a particular faith. It certainly makes life easier, to just blindly believe something for which you have no empirical evidence. At least Darren Daulton claims he's experienced the things he believes. I've always been skeptical of just how much even True Believers actually believe, though, as evidenced by the stubborn refusal of mourners at Christian funerals to be joyful at their loved one's ascension to heaven, and the Evangelicals' insistence that their faith be validated by being adopted by everyone else in the world.

The most difficult part of being human is in dealing with our own insignificance, the idea that we are formed out of essentially nothing, live out these lives thinking that we matter in the larger sphere of things, then die and go back to being nothing. Some people in the course of human history are going to have explanations that are a lot more comforting than what I've just outlined. Some of those are going to be able to accompany those explanations with a highly-developed charisma and placement in time that is receptive to those ideas. We call those people "prophets." Whether they are divine or crazy is something we can never know.