Be careful of this word “religion,” for, sadly, this term has come to often represent an insidious exploitation of the worst qualities of man. Although this may seem a harsh critique, I am opposed to downplaying the devastating effects this term can have on the potential for widespread destruction if left unchallenged. Why? Because "religion" has come to embody a type of commodity fetishism, selling fantasies and feeding off the hidden (and glaring) ambitions of the wayward while disguising itself as a type of comforting security blanket to protect people from their alienation and brokenness. If religion is a righteous occupation to be involved in then one should ask oneself why a rich and powerful robber baron who outwardly attacks the downtrodden, sexualizes and oppresses women, insults the disabled, steals from the poor, and exhibits little, if any, remorse would be interested in its proliferation. It is easy to be initially tricked into thinking there is some nobility in this cause, maybe regret, or desire to change one’s hateful ways. But this would be to disregard all evidence to the contrary, evidence that is found in the continuation of this man’s selfishness, arrogance, cynicism, narcissism, and self-centeredness. No, what draws this type of person to religion is twofold. One, religion’s ability to control the masses through “sacred” manipulation and authority. And two, its likeness to a type of high-brow capitalism in which one acts, not to sell products for material riches, but in a type of economic exchange of belief and conformance for salvation and eternal treasure. Unfortunately, I think "religion," in the common use of the word, is a lost cause and should likely be abandoned for other terms which better align to its original intent.

This is sad because, at its best, religion is simply a response to an unconditional event which cannot be conceptualized. It is this event, experienced even in the most common everyday unhappiness and brokenness of life, which drives every poet to attempt to articulate it. Yet, every artist feels, as they stand back and look at their completed work, like they’ve left out some essential component, as though this event of life could never be captured as it has been claimed to be in today's religion. This antagonism of wrestling with this event is what fuels an endless stream artistry and beauty in the world. This, I feel, is what the atheist finds most concerning about religion. Not the acknowledgement that there is a dimension of material reality that isn’t reducible to it, but with the assertion that this dimension can be discussed with authority. We make any discussion on religious ideas profane when we forget we are always engaging, with our speech, in a type of hoax. There is a domain of reality that cannot be talked about without our talking becoming hypocritical. This is no reason not to talk, but all the reason to caveat our words, when we attempt to point at it, with humility. Baseball, as religion, is touching on something other than the common use of the word. Not as a set of dogmas which elevates players and coaches for worship. Not as a ritual act of batting and catching. I’m talking about a much more subtle aspect of baseball. A subtly that is nearly lost in religion, as a concept, today. It is baseball as something that only promises one thing: heartache. Baseball is openly honest about this knowledge and doesn’t try to cover it up. It doesn't woo you into joining with the promise of eternal triumph. It exposes the sacred in a never-ending struggle for desire. It exposes God as a type of Absence which can never be filled but ever fuels one’s energy to come back, day after day. It is fulfilling in what it doesn’t give you. It’s a religion of nothing.

If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love my other work on the BENEFITS OF BROKENNESS!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

Those who really understand working out know that you are not really trying to gain anything, to alter your bodily form from what it is now from what you think it aught to be. You are centering fully into where you are. You are trying to experience life to its fullest in this moment. It is a spiritual experience. No different than any mystic in the throws of deep prayer. But the difficulty is that we do everything, even religious self-imposed religious suffering like Lenten fasting, under the assumption that it is all being done to get us somewhere better. With improvement as the motivation we miss the opportunity to do it. Change is the result of doing one's best at experiencing the emptiness inside in this moment. Improvement is a byproduct. Once it becomes the focus it is missed and no number of gains will make you feel more fulfilled. The ironic thing is that focusing on the improvement can be exactly what's keeping you from it. No, we tear ourselves down when we work out, so that we can be closer to the source of our being, be closer to nothing.

All living people hold a satisfactory enough version of the world – that is we’re all here so we haven’t thought it better to kill ourselves yet – and therefore, those of us that are still here fall into three primary states: we either want to reaffirm belief in that satisfactory enough version of the world and say “I am fully who I want to be” and just look for people who reaffirm that (this is what I call the deluded non-alienated being). Or we want to improve ourselves in some way, admitting we live “between who we are and who we want to be” and we look for the world to tell us who to be and how to be it (this is what I call the alienated being with the delusion of future non-alienation). In both states our communities are what provide that non-alienated service to us, allowing us to live in the delusion of a now or future wholeness. Communities are always necessary, but these two states are always unfree, for those fully bought into their community are always a slave to that community’s non-alienated fantasy.

The third state is different, for it is counterintuitive, yet it’s where the possibility of freedom arises. It is when we live “between who we are and who we want to be” BUT without ever pedestalizing our desire for a non-alienated state, without ever caring if “who we want to be” is achieved. This is living in the embrace of alienation, in a perpetual no-man’s land, still part of communities, yet freed from the ideologies of those communities. This is not “giving up.” Giving up can only apply to the cessation of persistence towards a future non-alienated state. In this state we still hold ultimate concerns, concerns for which we would gladly die, yet we are not enslaved to some finite version of that concern. In actuality, in this third state, I know the ultimacy of my concern can never be achieved, and this acknowledgement is what allows me to live well in no man’s land. In fact, in this third category my alienated state of non-achievement becomes my heaven, and community can be exposed for its seductive tendencies towards empty promises.

In baseball, this no man’s land for the fielder is exactly the place where the baseball must drop for exciting action to occur on the field. This no man’s land for the runner is exactly the place where he must courageously run for the possibility of scoring. We must willingly enter no man’s land to attain the unattainable. It is only in this place that attaining changes its meaning from "getting an end state" to "getting the never ending act of attaining itself."

The only thing more impressive than an all-powerful being creating the universe, is the lack of an all-powerful being creating the universe. This is the concept offered, in a way sarcastically, by Douglas Gasking, a professor of philosophy in the late 20th century, to a group of friends and made popular by Richard Dawkins in his book, The God Delusion in 2006. It posits that it would be a greater achievement for a ‘creator’ to create the universe if that creator had a disability. As, with all else being equal, it is a greater achievement for a pitcher who’s missing a hand (like Jim Abbott) to pitch a no-hitter in Major League Baseball than it would be for a pitcher not missing a hand. Taking this idea to its end, the greatest disability we can comprehend is non-existence. Therefore, the greatest being to create the universe must be one that does not exist.
 
Of course, there are many ways in which this ‘proof’ of the non-existence of God breaks down as it’s scrutinized. Yet all scrutiny pre-supposes one thing, that for something to be created, it had to be accomplished by a Being.  We first, as an unconscious fundamental position, place God in the context of pure, perfect Being-ness. Even the mere utilization of the word God in the prior sentence comes with a sense of an image of a sacred object that exists that we can point to. An object that builds other objects. Even if, over time, we’ve pushed this object further and further out of the visible realm, we still imagine it (i.e. 'Him') existing somewhere. Even if we feel, like Anslem did, that God is greater than that can be conceived, theist and atheist alike still fall victim to what John Calvin describes as the idol factory of our minds.
 
Initially this perfect man-like image of God, like the one painted by Michelangelo reaching towards us on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, seems correct. For as men and women we, at first, comprehend creation as something built by someone or something and see no other way to create than with hands. Over time this is rightfully revealed as an idolatrous vision, one which we must destroy to move towards truth beyond our own phantasmic projections. However, if we can recognize our predisposition for creating images (idols) to represent God, then a step towards destruction, odd as it may sound, would be to begin down Gasking’s path and imagine that Being having a major bodily impairment, like an amputation for example. In this new image of God-with-amputation, the phantom limb would represent a part of God that belongs to God but does not exist, turning the pure, perfect image into an apparently broken one.
 
If we allow ourselves to do this, we find moving in the direction of this Disabled God would reveal something more fundamental about the nature of the universe than the pure Being-ness God: its fundamental inevitable interdependence of being and non-being (i.e. its inevitability in contradiction of non-duality). In other words, that which we call God must not be pure existence, for pure Being would exclude non-existence, and non-existence is essential for existence to be realized. An example in the physical world is the need for the 'non-existent' void of space to make physical 'existing' objects distinguishable from one another. In this sense, a 'better' representation of God would be one we’d consider disabled, for its non-existent component would be unavoidable. And the evident brokenness of this Disabled God would be a stronger representative to enkindle life. How is this?
 
EXPOSING THE EVER-PRESENT ABSENCE:
For a person born with a missing limb (i.e. a non-existent limb), that absence of limb has the potential to be the most impactful thing in that person’s life. Notice, this 'missing' limb is not missing in the sense that it can be found and returned as we understand most missing things. It is an ever-present absence, never to be returned. Blasé Pascal spoke of the absence of a beloved while a lover waits for them in a coffee shop. To the lover waiting, their beloved’s absence (non-existence) is a presence that can, in that moment, be everything to the lover. To everyone else, the beloved’s absence means nothing. This is how non-existence can create.
 
A physical absence (as in the case of the amputated limb) is harder to ignore than an emptiness inside. It’s harder to repress, harder to cover up. So, people with disabilities such as this draw attention to a deeper truth: that lack (emptiness, non-existence, void) is an essential component of our being. In fact, it is the driving force in our lives. No matter how 'at peace' we say we are, we don’t move without a desire to move, and we don’t desire unless we lack what we desire. In other words, life is not life without desire. And desire doesn’t exist without absence.
 
Desire has been given a bad rap in many Eastern circles; presented as the source of all suffering, that which is to be eradicated to achieve enlightenment. This is true. Desire is the source of all suffering. But it is also the source of all joy. The path of elimination of desire sends the Eastern student on an endless desire to exterminate desire, like a dog chasing its own tail. The fatal flaw is in the conscious or unconscious belief that there is, once again, an attainable pure Being-ness, an endless escape from the suffering. The Western student is tricked by essentially the same flaw, that enlightenment as pure Being-ness is attainable (albeit they would likely call enlightenment something different, like Heaven or the inbreaking of the Holy Spirit or the Canon). That said, both positions are considered noble by worldly standards in their intention to eliminate suffering and drive the world forward towards some perfect Being-ness.
 
But what if the pedestal of pure Being-ness as the pinnacle of self-actualization – as God – is flawed, given it forsakes the critical mixture of existence with non-existence. What if this is why this intention often fuels the very suffering it intends to eradicate. Once again, the Disabled God can provide a better perspective here; that brokenness is fundamental, and pure Being-ness is not. The alienation felt as the mixture of being and non-being is who we are. In this sense, the Disabled God, once again, provides a better representative for us to relate to and strive for; a being at peace in its brokenness. So, how is this state achieved?
 
ACHIEVING PEACE IN BROKENNESS:
Well, both Eastern and Western have a very critical characteristic in common that assists on this journey: that is of emptying. The one correction provided by the vision of the Disabled God is the intention of emptying.
 
What is often misplaced is the goal of emptying. The goal of emptying is not to hedonistically become one with perfect Being-ness, or to achieve some power over the void inside, or to achieve some fruit of our emptying which is always a ‘better’ Being-ness. It’s not to nihilistically become the void, it’s not to eradicate oneself in order to dominate oneself. It’s simply to approach non-existence as an existing being in order to embrace it, and by embracing it, to build a better relationship with it. This is the deep knowledge in the phrase “love your enemy.” Our greatest enemy is always inside, fighting non-existence. In bringing being and non-being together in their non-togetherness we become one with the divine as a Disabled God. In this sense, if we are cursed to be a victim of the idol factory of our minds, let its production yield a Broken God, for brokenness as our example of perfection is what enlivens our form in a more fulfilling way. Love follows this pattern. In this same way, true love knows its beloved, but never fully. It always comes equipped with a component of infinite unknowability, an ever-present absence.
 
THE DESTRUCTION OF IDOLS:
And what of taking this idea radically to its end? The Disabled God can act as a step on the path to freedom in the death of God. Taking the Disabled God to its end is a path to eliminating the idol all together. At that point God then becomes the midst of love itself, a love where there is no image the lover requires the beloved to live up to. So, strive to embrace the void fully. This is the meaning of enlightenment. This is the meaning of grace. This is faith. We are disarticulated beings, severed inside. But we don’t need to be fixed. We are disabled, as the ontological source of our being is disabled. Let us use our disability to come together, to see our uniting force in brokenness together.
 
Richard Turilli is the author of HOLOGRAM HEROES. He enjoys exploring the benefits of our universal trait of brokenness on one’s path to freedom.

Also, If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL. Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com

​I found you in words explained to me clearly
I found you in the conceptions I made
The idols I built in the factory of my mind
In the heaven beyond the grave
I found you as the cause, the maker of this
I called you mine,  
With breath I gave
I made you wholly exist
 
Then Anslem taught, of one greater than thought
Beyond conceiving, beyond what things I could find
A light, a wind, a wave uncaught
An absent, yet present divine
 
Like a mystic, negation purified
You lost all tangible meaning
Left was nothing but what’s inside
Enraptured in numinous screaming
 
Mind saturated in absence, reframed understanding
Transcended in a surplus of lack, demanding.
You're nothing, but I can’t deny you’re with me
This emptiness knows, it sets me free
 
But could this be just perpetual illusion
Like the deceit of men in spiritual union
A magical trick, I ignorantly awed
A counter experience in the ridding of God
 
But to whom can I ask as I ravel like thread
The anguish of choice, existential dread
It can’t be for heaven if heaven a bribe
Or to follow the lead of what other’s inscribed
 
It must be my will, yet my will’s but effect
Of the various cancers those same others inject
How do I escape this alienation
Antagonist angst, endless frustration
 
If you are the one that we do not know
Like a crack which breaks its way into the flow
 
An unknowability, a constitutive lack
The way to the depths I need to unpack
The gap to which I unappealingly yield
The voice that calls from out of left field