A little sadder, a little wiser.

A year ago, I wrote this comment on Spencer Hall's always excellent, always exquisite college football season opener. 

A year later, a little sadder, a little wiser: College football makes you part of something bigger than yourself, and that is what makes it so dangerous. It makes fools of us mortals here, the idea of belonging, the idea of defending something so meaningfully meaningless, it makes you willing to step outside your normal bounds of human rationality.

We are the one who believe in miracles, you know. We name our plays after prayers, we speak even jokingly in fears and suppositions, we marry logic and the unseen and we balance this on the backs of young men, the backs of children who we do not know. We come here to our temples built of stone and steel and concrete and we yell out our supplications to the wind.

We have come to no Christian end, we were always there, we will always be there and we know this – yet we come back year after year, hoping that something in this, something in this family balances out the bad, that the money that we raise for good, that the life-extending joy we get, that this…thing is worth it.

Sometimes we’re brought back down to earth, and it hurts so much and reminds us that we are human (or it doesn’t and maybe for a second we think about what happened to us that we got here). Are we ourselves, or are we this thing we’ve given to ourselves, given ourselves (and our dollars and our time) to?
Is this thing worth it?

I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it isn’t.

"Sorry"

I just wish he'd say "sorry."

It's great that Baylor's hired a top law firm (and two very good, experienced lawyers) to investigate how the university handled the tragedy that I'm going to refer to as The Event, as I am tired of typing it out. It's great that students still feel safe and comfortable on Baylor's verdant campus, and it's great that the football team has moved on and is ready to play their first game.

There's just the little fact that a control-F of the two press releases on The Event (both conveniently buried at the bottom of Baylor's homepage, past the fluff about move-in and summer activities) reveals no "sorry" and no "apologize/apology."

Oh, I know. The hope is that the aforementioned investigation clears the university of all wrong-doing, and there's hope that there won't be a civil suit, and I get all of that but how can you not see that someone did something wrong, and therefore an apology is demanded. Not only to the victim, but to the alumni base who has stood by this university in times of trial before.

Stand up and say you're sorry.

We require it of our toddlers - say sorry! And mean it! We preach on it in chapel - the true meaning of Christianity is forgiveness, and humility. We require it of students who feud with their roommates! Why, now, is it so impossible for you to stand up and say it?

We're sorry.

We're sorry that such a deed happened in our hallowed halls, on our beloved campus. We're sorry that our inaction hurt not only someone who should have been protected above all else, but that it hurt the thousands of alumni that we love to ask for money. We're sorry that even if we had no idea that we were bringing this onto our campus, we did not react in a way to the crime that would leave us without the need to say "sorry."

We're sorry that this former student-athlete fell through the cracks of personal responsibility. We're sorry that we somehow overlooked something, somewhere. Mainly, we're sorry that we failed - because we did fail, and we need to not fail again.

Just say it. I promise no one will think the lesser of you for it.