Yogi Bera

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”  Such was the wisdom that exuded from infamous aphorisms of the baseball star of decades passed.  Speaking of baseball, he also ironically is remembered for saying “Baseball is 50% mental and the other half is physical.”  Often we – often I – feel like Yogi Bera (again, the baseball player, not the picnic basket-nabbing bear who had ‘Boo Boo’ as his trusty companion) and would like to use a baseball sock to stuff in our mouths if it would prevent any more outbursts from spewing out, or use the sock to yank over our heads to cover the shame after having pulled the trigger on the verbal assault rifle.  It seems a baseball sock – you know, the big, long ones that all socks from the 1980s looked like – would come in handy if the nerve from your brain to your tongue is quite short.  We don’t want to be like Bera and in trying to sound portentous end up sounding flaccid in the frontal cortex, and say something like “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”  Why do we dread so much what may come out of our mouths in those moments of fluid conversation that would bring the conversation to a screeching and awkward halt way faster than Usain Bolt’s 100m dash time?  Most likely it’s because we fear shame.  Shame is disgraceful – everyone else knows you’re wrong and, perhaps worse, you know you were wrong.  Picture Ariel Castro dropping his head in utter dejection in the courtroom (the guy who kidnapped and kept three young women in his house as sex slaves for ten years) for a mental image of what immense shame can do to the countenance.  Shame is when everyone’s finger is wagging at you and, internally, your own finger is wagging with them at yourself.  But not all shame is bad; in fact, there is a sort of shame that is to be embraced (1 Cor 1:18).  Not to mention, if you’re as witty, or maybe ill witted, as Bera, you can cover all your bases by insisting that “I’ve never said half the things I said.”