MESSAGE ON A BALLFIELD
Chance encounter with Houston Hotwheels prompts reflection on faith.
“To the place that I love, there my feet take me.” Hillel the Elder (Talmud, Sukkah 53a)
Boarding a flight the other day, I witnessed a modern miracle.
Folks were lined up in Boarding Group A, having paid extra to get on first. But they couldn’t. A different group was cutting the line.
One after another, young men and women rolled ahead. I watched out the window as wheelchairs were passed down the gate-check stairs to be stowed on the plane.
And not a single grumbling word was heard.
When it was my turn, I paused at the front seats. They were filled by this group, cinched into their places, with missing or atrophied legs, feet that simply didn’t work. It was obvious they were a team of some sort, so I asked. The Houston Hotwheels, the TIRR Memorial Hermann Rehabilitation and Research team, were headed to the Junior Wheelchair Softball World Series in Baltimore.
Serendipity had paid a visit. God was working in the everyday, sneaking up. I just didn’t know it yet.
We landed at National Airport in Washington, D.C., and I mentioned that I’d try to get up to watch them play ball. Then I headed over to Capitol Hill. The U.S. Senate was debating health care, and a big vote was scheduled. Throughout the evening and into the earlymorning hours, a rally was held on the lawn near the Senate. I was there to photograph the events.
No matter where you fall on health care reform, the results will impact people in very real ways. Speakers at the rally ranged from the most powerful in the country to the most humble. Some were famous and strong, others were almost anonymous, bound to special chairs that carried oxygen tanks. But all were serious. The air was hot, humid and grave. This was meaningful, but not fun.
Even when the final vote came in and the crowd had cause to celebrate, there still hung over them the sense that hard work lay ahead. Even in a win, there was little lasting joy.
The next morning, I headed up to Baltimore.
From a purely sporting perspective, wheelchair softball is a frantic, hybrid show. Players wheel around a specially designed ballfield at the Kennedy Krieger Institute. Players at this event are high school age. Some have played for years. The Houston Hotwheels are in their first year — and already at the World Series.
This is a long way from legislative debates about how we care for one another, including our sick or elderly or disabled. It is where the rubber literally hits the road. Watching the spirit in these competitors, their coaches and families who made the trip, I felt the heaviness of the previous evening’s political battles begin to drop off me.
An unmistakable admiration took its place. Respect for the athleticism. A subtle longing to be invited inside the easy camaraderie of the team — and not just the Houston team but the larger community on hand. There was support and cheering from one squad to the next, from one mother to another, from opposing coaches. And there was something like joy, too.
The road to this competition is a hard one. To compete means to be disabled.
Peter and Aaron Berry, orphaned and left paralyzed in a car crash in 2011, post up at shortstop and second base. They turn double plays just like the Astros, all the while strapped into wheelchairs. And they make it look fun.
Carrington Marendes is a two-time All America wheelchair basketball player, born with proximal femoral focal deficiency — basically, with no thighs. He prowls center field like a lion, propelling his chair with powerful arms and shoulders, an indomitable smile on his face.
Bryce Cruz is a former football player at Spring’s Dekaney High School who lost the use of his legs after a staph infection invaded his spinal cord. He covers first base. This fall he heads up to the University of Texas at Arlington to play collegelevel wheelchair basketball.
All the players have their own stories, unique in the particulars but common in the outcome: These kids don’t quit. Carrying enormous burdens, they work hard, accept coaching, dare to fall, dare to get back up. They carry one another — and anyone else who can see in themselves a need.
St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscans, wrote in Rule of 1221, Chapter XII, “all the Friars ... should preach by their deeds.” It is not words alone that define instruction, inspiration or guidance.
The Hotwheels seem to know this instinctively. Their message is one of hope and healing, joy and living fully actualized lives despite limitations. They preach this as surely as any rabbi or pastor or imam or priest. They preach it in their spirit.
After a remarkable first-year run, the Hotwheels found themselves in the title game against a team from Minneapolis-St. Paul. A couple of hours earlier, Garrett Castillo of Houston had won the home-run derby. Then teams from Nebraska and Chicago settled the third- and fourth-place spots. Now came the big game.
At ballfields across the country, coaches tell their teams to get “baseball ready.” When the Hotwheels and Twins faced off, somebody yelled: “Hands on wheels!”
Then they played the game. The ball is oversized and soft, so no gloves are needed. The bases are painted on the artificial turf, so no bag impedes the wheelchairs. Most batters hold the bat in only one hand and have blocks behind their wheels to keep the chair in place. Beyond that, this is just softball. And these are just regular everyday athletes. A closer look, though, shows them to be something quite extraordinary. And it is most obvious in loss.
The Hotwheels had the early lead, but the Twins rallied to win. And yet, despite the result, there was no anger, no defeated faces, no grumbling words. There was, instead, a simple joy in having come so far and done one’s best.
That is when it all came together for me. As I watched from the sideline, their spirit reached me.
Several times in the New Testament, Jesus is approached by a sick or lamed person seeking healing, and he tells them: “Your faith has healed you.”
Your faith has healed you. Not some miracle or modern medical device, not the direct intervention of the divine, but the faith of the individual.
That is what radiated from these players: faith. Faith in themselves and their teammates. Faith in their coaches and the opponents. Faith in those of us watching or waiting back home to hear how they did. Faith in the rehab and medical personnel who moved them from broken to healed. Even if their legs don’t work, the young men and women were whole. Even if a medically complex condition might never be cured, they were ablebodied. They were well.
Ke’Sean Paire entered this world with a condition that resulted in an amputated leg and malformed right hand. Elyssa LeBlanc has Stickler Syndrome. Dustin Stallberg has spina bifida. And they all inspire me to imagine what faith I should have in myself and those around me.
They, and all the Hotwheels, challenge me to make my own faith a more active, daring thing, a thing that loves across every kind of barrier. They demand that I live a life without “others,” one in which I love my neighbor as myself — and know that everyone is my neighbor.
I had no idea what was waiting for me at the ballfield that weekend, but my feet led me there for a reason: I needed to be reminded of what I love. It was hands propelling wheels chasing a ball, hands pushed by arms powered by hearts that knew real joy and were not ashamed to fail, so long as they fail forward.
It was faith and hope and love, and the healing that comes from being in fellowship with others who preach that gospel all the time, even if they never say the words.