There is a fig tree taller than you in Indiana.
Fig trees are taller than you everywhere, really. Even the shortest ones stand at a height of 10 feet when fully grown. It’s not all that interesting on its own, though isolated statements hardly are.
It’s also the 56th line in Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude,” the title poem in his fourth book. It’s followed by “it will make you gasp.” And that’s followed by “it might make you want to stay alive even, thank you;” in which the semicolon is critical. The poem continues on in reverence, relief, and more and more thanks for dozens of lines.
The nature of the poem means readers can choose any line before or after those as the one that sticks out to them; as the one worth keeping close to remember when they need it most, or that they write out and tape to a space they pass frequently so they don’t forget in the first place. Their choice would serve them the way that any good excerpt does: by capturing the whole and reducing the need to comb over every word in a text or every moment of an experience. It becomes an aphorism. You get all you need to keep going from a tiny slice.
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Clayton Kershaw brought to light another excerpt this past weekend, writing “Genesis 9:12-16” across his Pride hat. In the event you’re unfamiliar with Bible script layouts Genesis is the book, 9 is the chapter, and 12-16 are the verses. Here’s the full text:
12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come:13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
Kershaw’s history with Pride and Pride-adjacent events is well-documented. Two years ago he went from being insulted by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence—a satirical LGBTQ charitable organization that has been around longer than he’s been alive—to hosting a team meeting about it to getting the Dodgers to move up their Christian Faith and Family Day.
These are relevant details to remember when considering the excerpt above. They remove the benefit of the doubt one might be tempted to give him. It’s essential when processing that the passage is often cited by conservative Christian movements that want to take back the rainbow, emphasizing it as a symbol of God’s promise. What, exactly, is promised is less relevant than the notion of ownership. They consider it a divine symbol, shared by those touched by the divine nature, and out of reach to those who aren’t. The meaning of the symbol to those within the LGBTQ community, one of acceptance and inclusion, is contorted into an ill-fitting hat in the eye of the Lord. The message is clear: These groups want to undo the LGBTQ community by filtering its own language through what they deem to be a holier, more pleasant lens.
The most generous reading of Kershaw’s choice to write this specific Bible verse in front of the logo on his Pride hat still makes it awkward. Even failing to account for his poorly articulated message from the past through which his own discomfort is projected more than any actual wrongdoing by another party, it draws attention to himself and away from the team in a game in which he wasn’t pitching, and that wasn’t going to last more than a few hours. It drew the attention of most everyone, including some of the most acerbic media outlets. Immediately after the game, searching the passage online returned results from The Daily Wire, OutKick, and Fox News. According to Ad Fontes Media, a public benefit corporation, each source regularly skews right, often landing in “hyper partisan” territory. The work of each one can be described consistently by terms like “wide variation in reliability,” “selective or incomplete/unfair persuasion,” and “contains misleading info.” Their biggest voices are their biggest dorks.
Kershaw’s deliberate action in the name of God was passive aggressive and divisive, rather than plain and confident. It comes off as fearful and haughty. Yet the whole point of symbol- and metaphor-laden texts like the Bible is to see how applicable they were and can be in a given situation. In baseball terms, the concrete is dry on a prospect when they can’t physically develop anymore. They’re maxed out. The concrete isn’t supposed to dry on a book like the Bible. It’s a collection of stories designed to serve as a guide for trying to hit the moving target everyone faces in daily life.
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Just before the passage Kershaw wrote on his hat is another that reads “[God] will demand an accounting for the life of another human being,” which speaks specifically to murder. It could be read also as a consequence to restricting the harmless existence of another in a harmful way—say, someone whose sexual or gender identity didn’t align with yours, and whose life would otherwise run completely separate. Pride Nights at ballparks are once a year. Objecting to them demeans and dismisses a group that incurs a more dangerous life for simply existing as they are. We could go through the rest of the book of Genesis or other parts of the Bible and go back and forth about all of this for days. We can also skip that and go somewhere else even further back than the Bible, speaking to a larger point.
A flood is a central part in the Gilgamesh epic, which was cobbled together from Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian cultures. The lone survivors are Utnapishtim and his family, and Utnapishtim helps the title character along his journey. Gilgamesh only gets that far because he’s actively mourning and seeking out additional life after losing his best friend Enkidu, with whom he had at least a homoerotic relationship. The Maori flood comes when tribes get into a pissing match with each other and forget their higher power. In Hindu, a man named Manu cares for and protects a fish from bigger, more threatening ones until it’s big enough to need the ocean, and in return the fish warns him of a coming flood. These stories appear in dozens and dozens of cultures and creation myths. Calling them common would be an understatement. Ironically, it’s what makes them special more than anything else. People all over the world have been tapping into them for millennia on their own despite being incapable of speaking to each other to spread them. No one was sending a text about a story they just heard to their buddy across the globe, or linking them to the most viral FloodTok.
An excerpt can turn into a lovely, encouraging shorthand. And still, individuals have a responsibility to themselves and each other to make sure they understand the larger picture in which it’s rooted. Clayton Kershaw is free to lean on the Bible and gain from all that it has to offer. It shouldn’t keep him from opening another book to understand it more and infringe on others less. Short of that, he can keep to himself for a few more hours a year.
Thank you for reading
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