The evolution of baseball and heirloom tomatoes

I have been rolling this around in my head for awhile, and the moment has finally come to put it on the screen. Baseball is like tomatoes. Barry Bonds just broke a record and the sports analysts are having a field day arguing about whether or not it "counts." Well, of course it counts, he hit more home runs than Hank Aaron... that is a new record. It counts, but it just doesn't mean the same thing anymore. It is not comparing apples to oranges, but more like comparing heirloom tomatoes to grocery store tomatoes.

Heirloom tomatoes do no travel well. They weren't designed to travel. They were designed to be eaten still warm from the sun, just picked, and delicious alone or maybe a pinch of salt and pepper. Grocery store tomatoes were designed to be placed into trucks and driven halfway across the country or further and get to their destination without being squashed. It doesn't matter that they are pink, bland, and pithy. They are not about flavor, they are about distance.

And ever since the baseball strike, baseball has been more about distance (metaphorically) and less about flavor (more metaphor). It is not the same game that it used to be, and I propose that Unitarian Universalism does not much resemble Unitarianism or Universalism as they were originally developed. I am not saying that this is a bad thing. Grocery store tomatoes serve their purpose, after all. Our Unitarian Universalist tradition is a Living Tradition, growing and evolving, serving different needs for different people. Some people would rather go to Hy Vee and pick up some hothouse toms or hydroponically grown ones, and that is fine. Me? I'd rather pick them from my own vines and sit on my porch slurping them up after wiping the dirt off onto my jeans. It's a religious experience.