What #ALLinCLE means to me

I've been digging deep trying to figure out why this NBA championship means so much to me, why every floor seat of my heart seems sold out to the Cavs. It's an odd condition, this late b-ball season fever. Especially now, when I've lived the better part of my life away from Cleveland, Ohio. My reason is, superficially, one that many who grew up in Cleveland share--few of us have ever seen a pro sports championship for our hometown in our lifetimes. But I think this particular championship speaks to a larger narrative, the bigger story that kids from the rust belt know well. When you grow up in a place (think: Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh) where the industry has been steadily leaving since WWII, where the white flight epidemic has been dismantling the rich cultural vestiges of a city, where the uniform offered to the majority of black men is an orange jumpsuit or a suit for his funeral, the hope that Lebron James has offered to Cleveland is a hope of a certain resurrection. His story, the son of a single mother who was given a remarkable athletic gift, inspires us to remember not to buy the lie. The lie that steel was our only export when we know that we manufacture more heart, more resilience on any given day as gritty Mid-westerners than Steph Curry pops out his mouthguard. The lie that bombed-out neighborhoods preyed upon by subprime lenders cannot recover when we know our incredible power to hold Wall Street accountable and to do right by our neighbors. The lie that young people are all bound for destruction, corruption, or death when we know that Gina deJesus, Amanda Berry, and Michelle Knight survived the worst kind of evil and haven't moved elsewhere--they've remained in the city that loved them and will continue to honor their matchless courage. No man or woman, not Lebron James, not Amanda Berry, not Moses Cleveland (the guy who "invented Cleveland"), can single-handedly lay claim to the renaissance of a city or its industries. It is by our hope -- an illogical, irrational, indefatiguable hope--by which we will be known.

It hurt when Lebron James made his Decision to "take his talents to Miami." At the time, it seemed like an impossibly arrogant statement. (The man never runs the risk of being humble.) In retrospect, I hear the echo of a different chorus, though. He may have taken his talents to Florida, but he stored his beating heart in the Ohio that raised him, a state whose monicker was once "the heart of it all." To me, "All in CLE" is more than a clever hashtag that will earmark a certain set of games in history. It's not just the condition that we fans are "all completely invested." It's that we all, we in every zipcode and every exurb and every far-removed pocket from Cleveland, are actually all IN Cleveland. Because that is where our hearts live and from where our exhaustless hope derives.

Back to Believeland Tuesday. I'll hear you there. #ALLINCLE

Photos by Fr. Patrick Anderson