A Ride Proves We Can Make the World a Better Place. TOGETHER!

“Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.”  --Marian Wright Edelman

I always cry at the end of the ride. Tear up. Get choked up when I finally arrive at the finish.

Let me start at the start. In a little more than a week, August 5^th to be exact, me and about 6,000 other cyclists will ride up to 211 miles in two days, as we all participate in the Pan Mass Challenge (PMC). If you’ve noticed more bikers on the road these past few weekends, many of those are PMC folk getting in their final training miles before the big day or days. For more than forty years, the PMC has raised almost $900 million for the Dana Farber Institute, Boston’s world class cancer treatment center in Boston. Our 2023 goal is $70 million, and every dollar goes to the cause.

It is a ride of amazing numbers.

At its longest point it stretches all the way from the rolling hills of Sturbridge to the rolling dunes of Provincetown, more than 200 miles. I’m cycling one day from Wellesley to Bourne, about 82 miles. It takes a good while to get from here to there. I’ll start out at 7 am or so in the morning and arrive at the bridge (God willing and good weather!) by 3 pm or so. And yes, by the end my backside is pretty sore. One metric I found estimates that me and the folks on my route will circle our pedals some 55,000 times that day.

I do the PMC for lots of reasons. It gets me off the couch and on to my bike, forces me to get back into shape each spring and summer. I ride for the people I love and at the church I serve who have cancer or who have succumbed to cancer. I always carry their names with me: Scott, Uncle Billy, Uncle Mark, Nora, T. Michael, Sue, Dorothy, Lynne…that list is a long one.

But hope lies in the truth that in the 13 years I’ve ridden, the advances in cancer care have been almost miraculous. The PMC has been a big part of those breakthroughs at the Dana Farber.  I also ride for the thrill and the fear of actually riding a bike that long a distance. Each year I wonder: can I do it? I ride for the discipline it forces me to have every summer.  Can’t fake it. Either you can do it or can’t and the day of the ride is always crunch time. I ride because the life I have is a pretty darn good one and so my faith and my conscience tells me that it is my responsibility and call to help others. To do some good while I am here. To share the abundance of my life with others.   

One of the biggest reasons I ride is to just be a part of something bigger than myself.  To be involved and in the thick of a great cause, a bold crusade and to do that with thousands of other amazing people. While out on my training rides I inevitably see at least one other PMC’er and we nod in recognition and sometimes we even yell out encouragement to one another. “Have a good ride!” “Be safe!” “Good luck!”  There is a power and a grace to being a part of such a world changing group of people.  All of us pedaling and straining and working and trying our best to achieve these simple goals.

To beat cancer once and for all. To find a cure. To give hope to those who are sick and to their loved ones.

So, if I may do so, on behalf of all the PMC riders and volunteers and staff: if you are a praying person please pray for our rides. For safety. For cool temps and maybe even a cloudy day! (Last year was almost 100 degrees and full sun.) Pray for the folks in your life who have cancer, and those who have passed on, and those who grieve and those who are still fighting.

We are living in very toxic times in a very toxic world. It’s even fashionable, especially among the political elite and media, to be cynical about the world.  To tear down others without a thought. To talk not of the good but instead to always focus on the bad. To look out into God’s Creation and feel not hope, but instead despair. 

But when you get to be in community with almost 10,000 people for the weekend, people who want to be a part of the solution, people who want to do good, people who smile through the sweat, people who just keep pedaling…you get to see the world can be a beautiful place too.

If you see us on our bikes in the days ahead or on PMC weekend, please give us a wave and we will wave and smile right back at you. Maybe that might make you feel more hopeful for the world. Imagine having the faith that a small group of committed people, working together, can absolutely can actually make a difference.

Change the world. Heal the hurting. Comfort the afflicted. And all on two wheels and under human power and grit. Nothing more.

It’s for all these reasons that I cry each year when I get to the foot of the Bourne Bridge and then cross the finish line and remember and celebrate that I am a part of something bigger than myself. That all of us can make this world a better place, if we believe and if we get to work.Together.

That’s how I’ll be spending the first weekend in August. See you on the road!

(If you’d like to donate to my ride, go to: https://profile.pmc.org/JH0352)

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

    

"PLAY BALL!" and America's Aspiration to Truly Be 'For All'

“Put me in coach, I’m ready to play, today.  Look at me, I can be, center field.”    --from the song “Centerfield” by John Fogerty

Baseball for everyone. No one left out.

It’s called “Baseball for All” a movement and a nationwide organization. Its mission embodies for me two things in this world that I absolutely love. First, baseball, that most American of pastimes whose holy season is peaking right about now, as major league teams are in the thick of pennant races, even our own Boston Red Sox! And then there is the “…For All” declaration, for all, as in everyone is invited to play the game and no one is ever left out.  All God’s children have a place at the plate and in the field.

I love that vision.  To play a game where no one if ever left behind, where everyone has a chance to get picked for the team.  In baseball. In life.

“Baseball for All” was formed by ball player and coach Justine Siegal in 2010 with one simple goal: to promote the participation of girls and young women in the game of baseball at all levels of play. In the words of their founder, “Too many girls are told they can’t play baseball because of their gender. We’re here to change that. I want girls to know they can follow their passions and that they have no limits—that their dreams matter.”

I’ve been witness to this “Baseball for All” movement in the life of my 15-year-old Goddaughter Bridget, whom I’ve watched grow up in life and yes, grow up on the baseball field too.  I’ve seen her play ball, from the days in her backyard, when on tiny toddler legs she stood at the plate and swung her plastic bat with mighty gusto, at a wiffle ball I’d thrown. Days on the local ball field when in T-ball, she ran down the first base line with such joy, a huge smile on her face. I’ve watched her play in Little League, the only girl in the dugout, who played with such passion and purpose, squatting behind the plate as a scrappy catcher. 

And then I got to watch Bridget, just this past week, as she played for an all-girls team in the National Girls Baseball Championship. Upwards of 400 girls and young women played, from 8 to 18 years old, on more than forty teams, from the United States and Canada. They were the Florida Bolts and the Boston Slammers, the New York Wonders, and the Toronto Cardinals. They all came together to play ball and that they did. Hitting with power, fielding with finesse, and running like the wind.  That’s the baseball I saw as I cheered in the stands on a hot baseball field in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.

All those girls and young women want, is to be able to play, to be welcomed to compete on the field, just as surely and as clearly as boys and young men are invited to play.  Then baseball is truly “for all.” Kind of makes me think how wonderful it would be if all of life worked that way too.  You know.

For all.

As in for all of us to share in both the fruits and the challenges of this God-given life, none of us left behind or looked over or rejected or kept out.  That phrase ‘for all” is in fact found in the 31-word pledge of allegiance, the one you and I used to recite in the classroom before we went off to our school for the day. Remember? It’s not just “for all” but “liberty and justice for all.” For every single American. For you and for me and for the rich and the poor and the gay and the straight and the boy who plays baseball and the girl who plays baseball too. Christian and the Muslim and the non-believer as well.

“For all” has been an aspirational ideal of our country for a long, long time.  We struggle and we stumble to make this nation “for all” and then someone like Rosa Parks comes along and the door of equal opportunity and access to rights and privileges opens up a bit wider.  We are living in strange times, times when many politicians in our country aren’t expanding “for all” but are in fact diminishing the ranks of “all.”  Like if you are a trans kid in need of medical treatment. Or if you are a same sex couple looking for a graphic designer to help with your wedding. Or if you are just trying to vote but the government keeps making it harder and harder. These are times that can be discouraging for many of us, we who are a part of the “for all” too and want to see “for” actually become “for all.”

I find my hope, still, in the witness of all those girls and young women who have fought for so, so long for the chance to pick up a baseball and play the game. Play on a level playing field. Play just as hard as the boys and play to win, and play for the joy of competing, and play to just…play.  Way to go Bridget and all your baseball loving sisters too! Thank you.

You remind us that “for all” actually means for all.  No exceptions.  No one forced to sit out on the sidelines or in the dugout. Everyone invited to “PLAY BALL!”

God give us the courage and the resolve to realize this ideal and hope. For me. For you. For all.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.