The Natural

I am admittedly a baseball fanatic. When I see movies about baseball, it reminds me of every single reason I love the game. While watching 'The Natural' tonight, it brought everything full circle again.

There was an article on ESPN that talked about what a horrible example Roy Hobbs character was in the movie. The wickedness, the indulgences and the affairs of a man who should have been perfect because his game was perfect. I had to wonder if the man who wrote it saw the same movie I did.

I saw a deeply flawed young man who put his entire life on the line for baseball. He left behind a girl who believed in him for a meaningless encounter with an almighty strange woman that became far more than a one night stand. Far from merely changing his life from farm boy to a man of experience in the world, that one encounter almost killed him and certainly silenced that voice of reason that tries to whisper to us all.

From that moment on, everything he did until the end of the movie was simply a struggle to fill the void which he had created in his own life that was left by the death of his father and then, later, by Roy's choice to make baseball the be all and end all of his life. It is in the end of the movie when he is at his most vulnerable that Roy becomes more than the sum of his parts.

Confession comes in a hospital ward as the once girlfriend now grown woman stands at his bedside while Roy recouperates from the complications of having been shot many years earlier. Iris knows far more about what is really going on in life because she has raised his son without his help, a task in that day and age that most certainly wasn't applauded or understood, in order to see Roy fulfill their shared dream of his success on the diamond.

The unexpected happens when Roy in making his confessions of past indescretions and sins states to Iris, "I guess there are some mistakes you never stop paying for...". In that moment of quiet reflection over his own miserable failures and poor choices in life, Roy is beginning to see what his obsessions in both baseball and personal habits has truly cost him over the decades that passed from farm boy to man.

The answer that resounds for him and for the rest of us trying to get through life the best way we can is both merciful and profound. Iris tells him "I believe we have two lives. The life we learn with and the life we live with after we learn." There is a truth in that statement that reveals a great deal about how our Father in Heaven laid out the plans for our life here on this earth.

We were not sent here because we were to be the embodiment of complete perfection. Rather, we were sent here to learn by skinning up our knees and by scraping our chin and by crying the bitter tears that come through disappointment and loss. We were sent here to learn happiness that is a lasting, comfortable feeling from the fleeting emotions that accompany those times where we may just have been having fun.

Most of all, we were sent to learn and then take what we have learned and become a complete person through those lessons both good and bad. And that becomes the second life. Within that redemptive phase that begins from the moment that we truly 'get a clue' about who we are and where we are going.

There are moments in 'The Natural' where this complex drama is played out in crystal clear format. The denouement of the movie is one such moment. As he is down to his last strike, Roy is suffering. The entire crowd is suffering with him, but is unaware of both the extent of his personal crisis, which is being played out before their unknowing eyes, and of the pressure that the collective hopes of every fan is weighing upon his soul.

Iris stands in the opening of a tunnel, and Roy's son, not quite sure the full purpose of what is happening before his eyes, is somewhere in the grandstand. Looking onto the spectacle of human endeavor before her, Iris believes in Roy in a way that can only be described as eternal. She knows him to be more than he appears to be and knows that he can make right all that has been so very wrong for so long.

Iris has absolute faith that Roy can create a miracle in front of the people who only seek to see what their faith and trust in their flawed hero has purchased. Not only does he make a lasting moment in time, he does so even with the baggage, the pain and the sorrows of the past life from which he learned bringing literal blood flow from his wounded body.

It is a type of redemption that we seldom see in this kind of detail. While not exactly a sinless savior for the Knights, Roy becomes a sort of sacrificial lamb who willingly takes his swings to save the life of Pop Fisher and the rest of the team. They don't totally understand what he is suffering for them to win, they only know that Roy is doing it because he wants Pop to win and the team to be a success.

With Iris and the son he never knew he had looking on, Roy not only delivers the thunderous blow that lifts the coach, the entire team and its' fans from the clutches of the evil Judge and his conspirators, but it brings Roy back into a position to become the kind of man that Iris always believed he really was.

Balance is restored and he can go back to the town that gave him his honest start and help Iris finish raising the child he helped bring into the world, before the world pulled him away.

And it all happened in the 80 minutes of a movie.

No wonder I love baseball. Even when it is depicted in a movie.