Thinking a lot lately about this gif from the greatest baseball movie of all time: The Natural. I’ve used it as a somewhat hyperbolic illustration of my hopes for the election, because it captures the joy & relief most everyone I know hopes next week will bring. THREAD...

It seems moving and relevant to me in part because of the story itself: The Natural is about a ball player past his prime. He’s injured, the years have caught with him. Yet in the end, all that matters is that he has one big swing left in him -- maybe just like @JoeBiden.

But as much as the scene is about one man at the plate, I’ve been thinking about it more broadly as we’ve seen the early voting numbers and the long lines at polling places. The need, the urgency, to be part of this election speaks to the leap of faith that doing so will matter.

It reminds me of the definition of faith I found most persuasive as an undergrad religion major: Faith, the theologian Paul Tillich said, is a matter of “ultimate concern,” which can be seen most plainly at moments that seem set apart from our usual experience of time.

Tillich referred to such moments as kairos – a Greek word he used for times of decision and revelation, an idea of time distinct from the chronos in which we live our daily lives. While chronos is mundane, kairos concerns transcendent significance.

As an exile to the US who had fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Tillich knew something about how politics could present moments of kairos, but it could also be found metaphorically in unexpected places.

One of my college profs had studied with Tillich years before and told a story about taking him to a major league baseball game. When someone hit a homerun & Tillich seemed perplexed by what had happened, the students said "Kairos, Herr Professor! Kairos!" He jumped up & cheered.

I don’t think it's going too far to suggest that many are expecting something like kairos on November 3. In a healthy democracy, a single election should not represent an existential threat, but here we are: a moment of transcendent significance, a matter of ultimate concern.

Which is probably why I keep thinking of The Natural. So much still could go wrong, but if we hit it just right, there will be no disputing the results. It will simply all be over. Nothing left to do but round the bases and head for home. /END