For Cubs’ faithful, baseball and religion often overlap – Chicago Tribune
When the Cubs‘ Starlin Castro cracked a home run in Game 3 of last year’s divisional playoff series against the Cardinals, Affan Arain was praying.
Arain, who is Muslim, had excused himself from his seat and found an out-of-the-way spot in the Wrigley Field concourse for his daily evening ritual. The crowd’s roar provided an unmistakable soundtrack, and he knew instantly the Cubs had scored.
“In the midst of that prayer,” Arain said, “I prayed there would be many others.”
The Cubs went on to hit six home runs that night, a postseason record.
For Arain, like many Cubs fans of all religious persuasions, baseball and faith are inseparable. While prayers are the most visible sign of this connection — queue the close-up camera shot of a fretting fan in the stands, fingers interlocked and head bowed — the spiritual connection between loyal fans and their team often runs deeper, emerging in more subtle expressions of devotion.
“Perseverance, loyalty, faithfulness, long-suffering — those are the things that we talk about in our lives, and those are the things that we need when we cheer for the Cubs,” said Sister Ann Terese Reznicek, a nun of the Congregation of St. Joseph and a Cubs fan.
In his book “Baseball as a Road to God: Seeing Beyond the Game,” John Sexton writes, “In baseball as in religion, doubt and faith are intertwined.”
As the Cubs embark on their postseason journey this year with a 2-0 lead over the San Francisco Giants, fans “exist on the knifepoint of a sense of frailty and foreboding doom . . . and hope and fulfillment on the other,” Sexton said.
Those who study sports fandom from a religious studies’ perspective say there are many parallels between baseball and everyday life, and that being a dedicated fan of a sports team often connects directly with elements of the spiritual, and for those so inclined, religious behaviors.
Sexton, the president emeritus and a law professor at New York University whose best-selling 2013 book emerged from the class he teaches by the same name, grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. For years, Brooklyn fell agonizingly short of a championship, often at the hands of the Yankees, leaving supporters in doubt but falling back on faith in the famous mantra, “Wait ’til next year.”
When the Dodgers finally broke through on Oct. 4, 1955, Sexton clasped a crucifix in his basement as he listened to the final outs against the Yankees. “For me and millions of others,” Sexton wrote, “a sacred day.” Cubs fans have been longing for their sacred day for a lifetime.
Sexton uses baseball as a vehicle for helping students think about what religion and God mean to them, as a way for them to contemplate the world and their place in it. Baseball, Sexton said, has the power “to bring us to a deeper level of experience.”
Melanie Hesdorffer, an NYU student and Cubs fan from Winnetka who took Sexton’s class in the spring, said the class helped her to explore her faith and also made her realize how important the Cubs, and baseball, are to her. Hesdorffer, who is Jewish, wrote about being the only girl on her Park District baseball team in her application essay for Sexton’s class. Being a Cubs fan, she said, is “a stamp on my identity.”
Trips to Wrigley Field, she said, are more than baseball, beer and hot dogs.
“It’s a place that takes on this spirit, this feeling that is just indescribable,” Hesdorffer said.
Joseph Price, a religious studies professor at Whittier College in California who became a Cubs fan while attending divinity school at University of Chicago, wrote a commentary piece on the culture of baseball’s superstitions and also authored a book, “Rounding the Bases: Baseball and Religion in America.” Price’s book explores the historical links between the game and religion, including the ways that baseball reflects religious myths and how the sport often serves as the country’s civil religion.
There is alignment, Price says, between being devoted religiously and to one’s baseball team. Both experiences, he said, can be life-shaping.
Being a Cubs fan, an experience that often has ended in the team’s failure on the field and fans’ disappointment, Price said, allows people to prepare for the ultimate defeat in life: death. But staying loyal to the Cubs means fans, he said, are immersed in the “deep possibility of hope.”
Price, the son of a Baptist minister, has traveled with his class to Puerto Rico, where students have learned about legendary ballplayer Roberto Clemente, and his place as a saintlike figure there. Clemente, who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates for 18 years, was the first Latin American player elected to the Hall of Fame. He died in a plane crash in 1972 while trying to aid earthquake victims in Nicaragua.
In his 2004 essay, Price also writes about curses within religious traditions. “Curses are only effective as long as they are believed,” he said.
The power of prayer and the belief in a curse was a split topic among a group of Cubs fans at the Felician Sisters convent on Peterson Road in Chicago, where the nuns show their pride with blue-and-red sweatshirts and wheelchair tote bags. In the hallways or the cafeteria, the avid Cubs fans in the convent make sure the others know the score from last night’s game. The nuns, several of whom played in women’s baseball leagues when younger, watch or listen in their rooms and gather in the common area for potluck postseason parties.
“I pray for them a lot,” Sister Mary Clarine said. “When I have a feeling they might not make it or they might not hit that home run, or get their runners in, that’s when I pray for them.”
Others were not so specific in their prayers, focusing more on the health and well-being of the players, and making an expression of caring.
“I think prayers are important. I think they know that a lot of people are praying for them,” Sister Imeldis Lubash said. “It’s just our faithfulness and our loyalty.”
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