I visited the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, not so long ago with my wife, our daughter and my sister. I spent two very happy days there; the women stayed an hour or so, I think, and quickly went off shopping. For me it was a trip back to my boyhood when baseball seemed more important than life itself.
All around me in the Hall of Fame were the relics of the early years of baseball; Babe Ruth’s bats were there; they looked as huge and rough as a caveman’s clubs; Jackie Robinson’s jersey was there with the number 42 he made famous. Robinson was such a thrilling base runner that my old Irish mother would stop her work in the house to watch him on the TV. I saw the gloves and bats of old heroes whose autographs I had gotten—Mel Ott, Joe Medwick, Joe DiMaggio and many others. I spent a good bit of my time in the Hall of Fame at the special exhibit it has of the “Peanuts” comic strip featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Schubert and their sad and famous baseball team.
Charlie’s team had Snoopy at short stop, the cranky Lucy in centerfield, Schubert catching and Charlie himself pitching. They had one of the worst records ever compiled by any baseball team. They lost one game 200-0. In another game the score was 37-0 against them at the end of the first inning. Some seasons passed without a single victory. Readers of that comic strip sorrowed with the young players. After one game Charlie asked the famous question, “How can we always lose? We’re so sincere.”
I remember looking at Charlie’s sad face in the cartoon and thinking not of baseball, but of my many friends in social action and justice and peace work in the Philippines, who often appear as sad as Charlie. They are downcast because nothing seems to improve in the country despite all their efforts. There has been so much effort and goodwill, so many young lives spent with so little to show for their work. “How can we lose?” they also ask. “We’re so sincere.”
There might be less sadness if we allowed more time for change to occur, especially when the change we seek deals with basic values. Real moral change which is at the heart of true development takes a long time, certainly more than 5, 10 or even 25 years. It may take generations. The Catholic Church and other churches and Islam have tried for hundreds of years to form Filipino communities that hunger and thirst for justice. Who will say they have succeeded? Some 400 Filipino children die each day of malnutrition-related diseases; their lives could be saved if the larger society were more concerned with its poor.
We can see the importance of time in the development of people in the story of the Jewish slaves that fled Egypt with Moses. Their years in the desert show that even God can underestimate the time needed to form a free, moral and self-sufficient people.
After crossing the Red Sea, the Jewish people marched to Mount Sinai where God gave them the Ten Commandments and entered into a covenant with them to be their God and they His people. The American Bible in its introduction to the Book of Exodus claims, “At Sinai God gave the Jewish people through Moses the moral, civil and ritual legislation through which they could become an independent and holy people.” Events showed they were not ready for such a demanding role. Even as Moses was on the mountain with the Lord, the people built a golden calf and worshipped it. Moses smashed the commandments to the ground when he saw what they had done.
God judged the people needed a much longer time in the desert to be fit and sufficiently reformed to enter the Promised Land. It took 40 years before the people were judged ready.
The failure of the Jewish people to meet God’s high standards at Mount Sinai should not have been a surprise. They had been a nation of slaves for many generations, and so had assimilated the mind of a slave, as this process has been explained in recent years by Paolo Freire and Frantz Fanon. The people lacked confidence in themselves. They lacked courage, loyalty, intellectual independence, solidarity and all the virtues needed to be free and dedicated to a great vocation.
We must be patient with the pace of change and patient with ourselves. Patience is not complacency. We have to work as hard as ever, but we should take the setbacks with a little more understanding that they are part of the process and unavoidable.
Like the Israelites in the desert, the Philippines may have a longer time in the desert because its socioeconomic development is so integral to its religious vocation.
Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates.