Quiet, please--baseball game in progress

I went up to Milwaukee again today to watch another baseball game, this time against my favorite team, the Reds (who lost, by the way, in truly ugly fashion--their bullpen is so, so bad). But the thing that made me ponder did not take place on the field.

The ticket I used was a Father's Day gift and it was a great seat--seven rows behind home plate. The crowd was pretty genial and somewhat sedate around where I was sitting. There were a few of us Reds fans and the Brewer fans didn't seem to mind our occasional cheering for the opposition. Until the top of the 9th. There was a guy (a Reds fan) a few rows behind me who started screaming at the Brewer pitcher. He kept calling the pitcher a "muppet" (he did kind of look like one) and kept saying over and over that he needed to throw harder. It was a weird sort of heckling and a little annoying, but nothing outrageous. After a while, however, a Brewer fan turned around told him to knock it off. The Reds fan made his case quite well: He wasn't swearing; he was simply cheering for his team. The Brewer fan then started to educate him on how he was supposed to cheer. It was OK to cheer for the Reds, apparently, but not OK to say anything bad about the Brewers. They went back and forth on this topic for a few minutes, to the chagrin and amusement of the people sitting around them. I thought the Brewer fan was making kind of a ludicrous case, but then he said something that made me think of church. He said to the Reds fan, "You're too exuberant."

Ah, yes. Exuberance. Passion. Excitement. So many in our society look askance at people of faith if they show a little too much exuberance. Keep it quiet. Keep it to yourself. Keep me out of it.

"We shouldn't put down people who show great euphoria and excitement after a born again or religious experience. They're right. Suddenly the world makes sense for them. Suddenly it's okay, despite the absurdity, the injustice, the pain. Life is now so spacious that we can even absorb the contradictions. God is so great, so bottomless, so empty, that God can absorb even the contraries, even the collision of opposites. Thus salvation often feels like a kind of universal amnesty, a total forgiveness of ourselves and all other things."
--From "Everything Belongs" by Richard Rohr