My Sunday Feeling

I noticed the piece of paper under one of my wipers as I crossed the parking lot.  That's not unusual at Dickey-Stephens park where the minor league Arkansas Travelers play.  Typically, the stuff you find when you get back to your car consists of coupons to fast food joints or car washes.  

No such luck of finding such minimally useful material on this hot July night at the ballyard.  It was a religious tract put out by something called the Fellowship Tract League out of Ohio. I looked them up online. Their stated purpose is to fulfill the Great Commission and to that end they crank out religious tracts on various subjects in virtually every language on the face of the Earth.  I, along with the other unsuspecting baseball fans were the beneficiary of their outreach that night.

 On the cover of the tract was a cartoon drawing of Christ bearing his Cross and was entitled "Hear Ye Him!"  The drawing was reminiscent of the style of R.Crumb.  It was also highly evocative of another publisher of this kind of propaganda that I experienced in my youth in Southwest Little Rock.

Tracts ( and the Baptists of my youth were big on this mode of communication) put out by Chick Publications back in those days were as ubiquitous as Cliff Notes.  I don't know much about the Fellowship Tract League but Chick specialized in Catholic baiting and hellfire and brimstone theology, usually narrated in comic book form.  And typically they depicted somebody rejecting God and getting tossed into the Inferno as a consequence.  Subtle, your typical Chick tract, was not.  And it was not unusual back in those days to find exhortations to right living  on your car, in the high school parking lot, at church or at the grocery store.  I typically just tossed them.  After all, if you read one you read them all.

Since I hadn't seen this kind of propaganda in some time, I decided to read it when I got home. The pamphlet left unbidden by me on my vehicle was only slightly more subtle than the appeals to reason put out by Chick.  At least there were no cartoon drawings of former martini drinkers getting tossed into Perdition by the very God that professed to love us buried somewhere earlier in the text.  Which I found a refreshing departure from the entreaties concerning the bad religion of my youth.  

However, the back page gives you a couple of blocks to check.  "I choose to reject Christ" or "I choose to accept Christ."  It then provides a place for you to put down your name and address so you can mail it back.  I guess. So naturally, I started wondering if anybody had sufficiently pissed me off recently such that I would fill in their contact info and mail it back to the League.  After first rejecting Christ allegedly on their behalf of course.

Now of course this is all preposterous on a number of levels.  If I choose not to participate does silence equate to "rejection?"  As a matter of contract law, silence is rarely an acceptance.  Or at least that's what I think I remember at least.  Are my choices really that binary?

Also, I attend church.  Actually 3 different ones if you want to get technical.  And I suppose that your average Travelers fan has a church home.  Isn't it hubris or at least presumptuous to assume that us baseball fans need to get "reached" by a brand of Christian theology to which we may not subscribe?  Or even if I do, can't I go to the ballgame and not be bothered by literature left on my truck even if it is left by a fellow traveler?

It reminds me of a couple of memorable attempts to proselytize me in my past.  The first one was by some earnest young man from one of the "Big Box" churches out in West Little Rock.  For reasons that are still unknown, he was told (evidently by someone who didn't know me very well) that I might be willing to help fund his attempt to "evangelize" the City of London.  

I listened to his pitch.  I then I asked him " Correct me if I'm wrong.  But don't they have churches over there?  Like the Church of England?"  End of discussion.

The second pitch happened about 5 years ago.  I was sitting on my porch having a gin and tonic when another earnest young man approached me on behalf of the Mormons.  He asked me if I "needed" a card that explained Jesus Christ for me.

"Well Son," I said after taking a sip of my beverage. " I go to that big Methodist Church around the corner.  I'm seriously involved with a female deacon in that denomination.  I play golf with a Baptist preacher and I teach at a Catholic boy's school."

He looked at me with a blank expression on his face.

"So I don't guess you need one of these cards.  You have a good evening Sir."

"You too Son.  Be careful out there."

I somehow don't think that I could have the same sensible and civil conversation with the clandestine representative of the Fellowship Tract League as I did with the young Mormon boy if I had caught him in the act of evangelizing my vehicle.  Just a guess.  At least the Mormons have the guts to do it to your face.

So am I gonna send in an ersatz rejecting ballot with somebody's name and address on it?  Nah. 

I am not mad enough at anybody to sic the local office of the Fellowship Tract League on them.  

Nobody deserves that.  But I'm keeping the tract in my office in case I change my mind.