Messi, and I Know It...

One game.  Five goals.  Even I know that’s a big deal.  

Sports are not my natural habitat; I can converse fairly fluently in baseball, speak basketball and (American) football with a heavy accent, and communicate haltingly in soccer.  Yet even I, with my limited sports awareness, can recognize uncommon talent when it takes the field.   

Lionel Messi is said to mean more today to soccer than Michael Jordan did to basketball during the dynasty of the Bulls in the ‘90’s.  At 24, Messi has won the FIFA World Player of the year three times (only a handful of players have won it three times, and no one more than three).  He scored 30 goals in just his last 25 games.  Last week he scored five goals in a Champion’s League game against Bayern Leverkusen.  Considering that soccer is a sport where common final scores are 2-1 or 1-0, five goals (by one team, let alone one player) is considered outrageous.

And yet, he’s done it.  And continues to do it.  He plays so well, so unspeakably, inhumanly well, that a friend (half) jokingly said to me, “If Jesus is the Son of God, is it possible that Messi is the grandson?”    

An interesting idea.  A provocative idea.  But certainly not a new idea.  Argentine soccer superstar Diego Maradona, forever enshrined in the hearts of fans for his 66-yard dribble through six English players to score the “Goal of the Century” against them in the quarterfinal round of the 1986 World Cup, is so revered that in 1998 a church bearing his name sprung up in Rosario, Argentina.

“Beloved Diego, thank you for your everlasting magic,” church-goers sing to the tune of Ave Maria, “We are the church of the football god, we believe in your divineness” The Church of Maradona boasts 40,000 members in 56 countries.  Crazy, or simply convinced the soccer star was imbued with a drop of divinity?  The faithful are split on the issue, themselves.  Couples are married, babies baptized in Maradona’s name – who can say how real is their belief?

What is unquestionably real, however, is our all-too-human habit of worship.  Our lives tend to be tempered by routine patters and expectations.  When something startling breaks in – be it the vast yawning gorges of the Grand Canyon or a man who wields impossible control over a black and white ball – we fall to our knees in wonder. We feel small.  Overwhelmed.  Insignificant in comparison.  Something in us cries, “Too much! Too much!”  We are undone.  

And yet, the same breath undone cries out, “More!”  Hearts wearied and worn thin by burdens common to man nurture a secret, silent hope that something greater, larger, and more significant than they stalks the universe. When fleeting glimpses of uncommon glory pass by, that which was hoped for shouts, “I am here!” and wearied hearts then swell, renewed and vindicated, hoarse with unbridled joy. “I knew it! I knew it!”

This is why we are gladly small in the presence of the great, why language fails us in the sharing of aching beauties, and why a sports hero can ignite so fiery a passion that it blazes through the very marrow of his fans daring them to believe he is more than a man – he is a god. We want there to be more than what we see.   We want there to be a plane of existence where the possibilities we barely dare to hope for reside.  We want to know that the very ordinariness of our lives and the messiness of our souls can be overcome, that the dreams we dream could come true.  They, the ones we are tempted to call deity, are loved because they hint that we are right.

Again, I return as I have so many times before to the question begged – why?  If we, all of us, great or small, are no more than bone and spittle and muscle and sweat, if we are the random result of random chemicals devoid of intentionality, then where did we develop a taste for purpose?  For worship?  How did we get so addicted to the promise of hope?  Why are we both humbled and inspired by startling beauty and by unspeakable, inhuman talent?  Witnessing what we never imagined could be done so moves us that joy forcibly overtakes every cell of our being – we laugh, cry, shout, and throw up our hands as if we had done it ourselves.  Indeed, we've briefly tasted the hope that we could have. 

Is Lionel Messi God’s grandson?  Is the moon the grandchild of the sun?  Or does one light the darkness through its ability to reflect the other?  The lesser glory is seen only by the presence of the greater glory.  A man who can score like an angel whispers of a God who enjoys watching him do so.  Even I know that’s a big deal. 

"Messi is my Maradona" -Diego Maradona

The "Right" Line

The slow growling snort of an exasperated sigh hissed behind me.  “They need to open more registers”, the short-grey-haired hisser harrumphed.  She clutched her four items and turned to the man behind her.  “Why don’t they open more registers?”  He shrugged.  She turned back to me.

“I could have stopped at the one in Leesburg”.  She informed everyone within earshot.  “They told me to stop for my knitting things on the way home.  The one in Leesburg is a few miles out of my way, but it wouldn’t have taken this long.”  She sighed again loudly.  She’d been waiting approximately four minutes.

Over the next ten minutes, she proceeded to get out of line three times to check the length of other lines, give a minute-by-minute play-by-play for the line immediately next to ours (which, she mentioned four times, was faster than ours and she should have gotten in it when she had first thought of it), and complain about the magazines in the check-out stands.  The Weight Watchers magazine wasn’t current and the Food Network special issue on Chocolate was just plain annoying.  She’d given up chocolate for Lent.

When I (and the man in front of me) encouraged her to take her crochet hooks and, please, go ahead of us, a shocked little girl look crossed her face.  She peered innocently through her glasses and her free hand fluttered to her heart.  “I could have waited!”  Clearly.

When my turn at the register finally arrived, a slow smile crossed the check out girl’s face.  “Kerosene!” she exclaimed, zapping the bar code with her hand-help scanner and laughing a private little chuckle.  “When I was a little girl I would sell it.”  She shook her head and continued to coax a steady beep from the item-fed scanner.

“Kerosena” She sang in a sing-songy voice, the past all swirled up about her eyes.  “We would get in line at 4:00 in the morning to wait and wait just to buy some, then sell it in the afternoon.” A patient beauty clung to her, a gentle peace rose and fell with the rhythm of her hands.  “It paid for my lunch at school, and pencils and things.”  She smiled, as if the chore had been more a pleasure than a pain.

“Where are you from?” I asked gently, always curious about international flavors that might spice up my otherwise “normal” days.

“Sierra Leone” she answered, smiling and nodding, lost in days gone by.  “Is that everything for you, then?”

It was.  It was quite enough, actually, when I thought about how she must have lived through (or at least known and loved some who had lived through) the brutal eleven year civil war that swept through Sierra Leone a decade or so ago.   In its wake, 50,000 people lay dead and more than two million were displaced as refugees.  I wondered if she were one of them.   

I wondered, too, if the woman with crochet hooks and precious little time to stand in line had any idea how short (comparatively) the line actually was.  Or how fortunate she was to stand in it, separated as she was from famine and civil war, government brutality and permanent displacement.  Granted, I had no idea the possible personal hells the knitting woman may have experienced or have been experiencing, but it seemed that being driven from one’s home reeked of a little more devastation than being driven to shorter lines in Leesburg.  Somehow, it all just didn’t feel fair.

But, what is fair?  Where does our desire for fairness, freedom and equality even come from?  Many cultures have vastly different histories, religions, values and priorities, but somehow hold similar convictions: murder, theft, and intentional abuse of innocents are always taboo.  Cowardice and selfishness are never praised. Most civilizations develop systems for judging between two opposing moral views (courts, etc.), but what gives anyone or any system the right to declare one particular behavior ‘right‘ and its opposite behavior ‘wrong’? 

Having spent over two years working with refugees, listening to their stories and settling them in new homes while they mourned the loss of homes destroyed and gone, I heard more accounts of pain and sorrow than I ever wanted to.  Stories about camps in Sierra Leone surfaced, stories of entire refugee camps made up of amputees.  Rebel leaders had a tradition – when they captured a village, anyone who refused to join them was forced to choose from a hat a folded slip of paper, on which was written either “short sleeves”, or “long sleeves”.  If they drew “short sleeves”, either one or both hands were chopped off.  If “long sleeves”, then one or both arms.

The painful truth is that if we are not intrinsically valuable, we have no right to condemn such behavior.  If our rights, as humans, are not equal or fundamental, if they are dependent instead on our status, our looks, our positions of power or wealth, then an entire community forced to function with fewer limbs than the rest of humanity should not shock us.   Three hundred amputees, the youngest of which a three-year-old girl, have no right to stir in us feelings of anger or compassion. But, would we feel human if they did not?

The world is a broken place and we are broken people – every religion in the world acknowledges it.  What were we, then, before being broken?  What carved the great schisms in our souls that cause us to be impatient and irritated, blood-thirsty and cruel?  How were we shattered?  And is it possible to gather the broken pieces together again?  Or have they been tossed away like so many amputated limbs?  When we view our collective pains as the results of fallen glory rather than simply distasteful behavior, a gentle glimmer of hope emerges.

For if we were, in fact, meant to be more, if we were endowed with worth that nothing can shake or break or tear from our souls, if our shock and sorrow at the depth of human brokenness reveals our collective history of once being something glorious, then is it not possible to hope we could be glorious again?  A Hebrew poet said that we were knit together in our mother’s womb – could we dare to hope that that which has unraveled could one day be woven again into coverings of healing?  That souls once severed could be restored? The frazzled yarn is still there…  I guess good knitting is worth the wait, after all.