Monday morning quarterbacking.

 Monday morning quarterbacking. 

We thought he might be there to tell us about our rector Susan, who was still in, Uncle Albert’s term, “M.I.A.” He (Albert) had emailed her earlier in the week, but as yet he’d heard nothing back. And likely everyone there - the true members of the parish - everyone but the two of us knew where she was. No one looked worried.

     Maybe the bishop, a little. But his worry may have had to do with the reading from the gospel on which he was going to preach. It’s the one where the rich young man comes to Jesus wanting to know what he must do to “inherit eternal” - or, I’d say, true - “life.” And Jesus suggests keeping the law: “Do not kill. Do not steal, commit adultery, lie.” But the young man does that, he assures Jesus. “Well, there’s one more thing,” Jesus says. “Sell everything you have, give the money to the poor, and follow me.” “That’s not one, that’s three more things,” the young must be thinking as he walks heavily away. The gospeleer adds that his step his heavy because he is rich.

     “How hard for the rich to do that,” Jesus tells his disciples, meaning inherit eternal, true life. “Easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle,” he says. And they’re thinking, “Who can, then?” If the rich can’t somehow bribe their way in, who can and how?

      The bishop is as nonplussed as disciples; he looks all at once uneasy in all his finery, carrying his gold-painted crook, wearing his improbable hat. Even if he puts the gilded crook aside and takes off the high hat, to preach, he is still wrapped in his splendid white robe, around his neck is still this stiff stole, shot through with gold and emerald and ruby thread.

But he pushes on - what can he do? And he offers comfort because with God “nothing is impossible,” even the impossible, he's pretty sure, is possible with God. And he tells a story of how he once scored a goal in under-12s soccer and his father took him out after for ice cream. If that is possible for a father that might well give his sons a serpent instead of a fish, then surely God can bequeath life to Episcopalians.

Uncle Albert comes home with me though there is no Premier League football this weekend. He sits in what has become his chair and listens to Pat Matheny while I swap the laundry Roz has started from washer to dryer and she puts together an English breakfast, bacon and sausage and tomato and mushrooms and beans, egg sunny-side up. We eat like the rich.

Afterward, I ask Uncle Albert if he wants to stay to watch “American football.”

     “The Washington Football Club,” I say, “plays at one.”

     “You don’t use the team name,” Uncle Albert says. “Thank you.” But he’ll pass.

He’s a wise man. I take him home. I come back. Roz leaves to play penny-ante poker with former-Southern-Baptist friends, a newly forming ritual. I shift another load of laundry and put the lunch dishes into the dishwasher.

     I turn on the game. I’m watching a second, or is it a third, or which part of which third? when she returns.

“The center is the only down lineman that
handles the ball.” - from The Alabama Crimson
Tide ‘Playbook’ for Young Fans by Gene Stallings

I never cease to be amazed at how much professional football I can watch when I care nothing about any of the teams. It’s why I can switch from game to game to game because I have no real interest in the outcomes. Then something unexpected happens - insofar as that is possible - and I find myself ginning up into caring about what I don’t even find interesting.

     It doesn’t help if I remind myself that American football is the stupidest of all the so-called “ball” games. Can the reader think of another in which four players of the team on offense - with the ball - can never touch it? A game in which the ball is not shaped like a ball at all but a bulbous turd? It’s the color of a turd, it’s the texture of a turd so the center can center it and the quarterback can grip it properly. He, the center, is the only “down lineman” that can touch the ball but only to squeeze it out or shoot it back to the tiny (six-foot-four-inch, two-hundred-thirty-pound) brain, which does not, however, respond as a normal brain does to instructions it is receiving from a normal body or from outside such a body but as the brains of saints and hermits do, following disembodied voices planted in his garishly painted oversized skull.

     And the passing of the turd is only the beginning of the inane mayhem that follows.

                                                                                                 Selah.

10.15.18