He gave me my name, the Bible and baseball,  and the belief in the separation of religion and politics,  Dad was in the background of my childhood, but he instilled some passions that continue to this day.  My mother was my writing mentor, yet I remember a thrill reading Dad’s short story “Now Pitching.”  It had the drama of the relief pitcher coming in to save the game with everyone depending on him. The relief pitcher rising to the occasion that only he could fulfill. That was our dream. Be the savior.

Yet my father never demanded the spotlight. He stayed in the background until his skills were called for. He was happy to be the young people’s adult sponsor in our church, a position that cultivated no glory. But he had an agenda, and it wasn’t always the agenda of the church. He liked Youth for Christ, Inter-varsity, and Billy Graham.

The Presbyterian Church was a little too liberal for his taste, even though we were card-carrying members for most of the ’60’s and ’70’s.  He prided himself on being an evangelical, not a fundamentalist, but a slightly more progressive faith never to be confused with liberals. “Liberals” had a suspicious odor in my father’s universe. They didn’t believe in the literal Bible. A church should be a “Bible-believing” church or it didn’t measure up.

Dad was a true adventist in that he expected the return of Christ in his lifetime. When he lay on his deathbed, that was his greatest disappointment: the Lord had “tarried” beyond his lifetime.  He always thought this long-suffering Earth would be saved by the coming of Jesus. His sister used to comment on every disaster by saying, “The Lord is coming to take us all to heaven.”   Dad was not that simplistic in his expectations, but he certainly did not subscribe to the “Social Gospel” that assumed responsibility for humankind’s future condition in the here and now.

None of that prevented Dad from putting his faith in the Yankees and any other New York team.  He knew they were driven by hard-drinking and womanizing men like Billy Martin, Mickey Mantle, and Whitey Ford, but there was also their one saint and my hero: Bobby Richardson, who spoke at Youth for Christ and always proclaimed his evangelical faith. Richardson was an All-Star second baseman who was the Most Valuable Player of the 1960 World Series.   The Yankees of the late fifties and early sixties were almost unbeatable, so it was easy to forgive their venial sins.  They were regularly in the World Series and often the champs. In George Weiss we trusted to always get the best players. They used to say there was a talent chute between Kansas City and New York that brought valuable players to the Yankees like Ralph Terry and Hector Lopez.

My Dad’s other heroes were Billy Graham and President Dwight Eisenhower, “the greatest of all time.”   In Dad’s opinion Eisenhower’s administrative wartime skills carried over to peacetime.  Probably the extended peacetime he presided over gave him some credibility, and Dad’s college education, paid for by the GI bill, was a boon he never forgot. Dad boasted his college education cost him eighteen dollars, merely because the last credit didn’t get GI bill coverage for some reason.

And Billy Graham was a God-chosen evangelist, who never got entangled in politics, according to Dad. Dad did not look too closely at the close relationship between President Nixon and the Evangelist, an entanglement that Graham himself regretted in retrospect. Dad understood the hazards of mixing politics and religion in the church. He had a healthy attitude about separating church and state, and did not welcome Jerry Falwell’s entrance into the political arena.

It was partly because Dad divorced religion from politics and baseball and just about everything else that we never had a serious falling out. My politics got more liberal in the 1970’s and I registered as a Conscientious Objector when I graduated from college, but I was true to my faith. When I moved to Boston for graduate school I abandoned the Yankees for the Boston Red Sox, and we attended a few Sox-Yankees games without family skirmishes, but we still shared our evangelical faith.

During a period of losing my spiritual bearings in the 1980’s, my wife Kathy reassured my family I would find my way back, and I finally did.  Dad never seemed to lose faith in me, while I lost faith in God. I honestly cannot recall my father trying to nudge me back on the way. I would probably have remembered that.

By the time his heart gave out I was teaching college in Michigan and turned into an Episcopalian. I had turned in my Evangelical card, if I ever had one.  Neither of us saw that coming. When Dad himself died in December, 2000, he and Mom were attending my aunt’s Episcopal church in Huntington, Connecticut.  We had come to similar churches by different routes.  When you consider our devout Evangelical origins, you would have to say God had a sense of humor, if God had guided us into what seemed like the ultimate liberal destination.

Now I am a Cardinals fan and have given up on sola scriptura, the belief that all revelation comes directly from the Bible yet my father’s bequest of baseball and the Bible remains strong in my life.  If he has the gift of knowing about the living, he would likely be pleased at how I turned out.  If he can’t observe my life from heaven, that is probably no more than the Bible claims that we  know about the dead, as Dad himself would insist.

Dad, we’ll have to catch up later.