It will be baseball. It will be prayer: The poetry of E. Ethelbert Miller

I enjoyed Matthew Rich’s piece about baseball and the church. Like him, I find that lessons from the game can illustrate my pastoral vocation. My faith is also inspired by Black poet and activist E. Ethelbert Miller’s interpretation of baseball through his cultural lens and personal experience.

When Your Wife Has Tommy John Surgery is a collection of poems that follows the author’s If God Invented Baseball. Like his previous work, Miller traces his involvement with the sport throughout his lifetime. However, poems set in the past couple of years address the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. For instance, the line, “Every year, the World Series is played with survivors,” is especially poignant against the deaths suffered from COVID-19 and by police brutality. In “Lost in the Sun,” Miller takes the title phrase, which usually applies to a player dropping a flyball, and reimagines it by the tragic reality of “Black fathers no longer standing/ in a field of dreams.” At their children’s funerals, these men wear “sunglasses unable to hide their/ grief.”

Obviously, racial violence is not a game. Miller’s metaphors, however, recast the sport through Black experience. He writes, “Baseball is a game of blues.” This blues impulse names injustice and laments the truth. In “A Rookie During the Season of Coronavirus,” Miller mourns, “How can something end before it begins?/ I thought baseball was forever.” To my ear, he echoes the psalmist’s words, “How long, O Lord? How long?”

Like the Psalms, Miller’s collection also includes hope. In addition to the blues, he compares baseball to another great Black art—jazz. Titles of poems evoke albums by Miles Davis and Duke Ellington and, like a jazz riff, name the poignancy of “savoring the moment” and someone who “worked/ hard all week for life’s tenderness.”

Reading Miller, I am struck by this author’s poetic impulse to allude to the Christian paradox of believing that the kingdom has come near (Mark 1:15) and, at the same time, we are still laboring for its arrival (Romans 8:22). Like the author of Revelation, Miller can foresee an eschatological future, yet his new heaven and new earth are as earthly as blues, as sunlit as jazz, as hopeful as a new spring season: “when the games return… a sudden beauty will appear…. It will/ be baseball. It will be prayer.”

As a poet and preacher, Miller calls for God’s people to say: “Play ball.”