Ray had learned that Terence’s childhood dream was to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the team’s move to Los Angeles was one of the most heartbreaking moments of his life.
The next day, however, Ray again hears the mysterious voice, this time calling on him to “ease his pain,” and again a vision follows: Ray is convinced that he must travel to Boston and, for reasons he knows not, take the controversial 1960s author Terence Mann to Fenway Park. They’re all welcome here I built this for you,” Ray replies, just before Shoeless Joe disappears into the cornfields. Shoeless Joe asks Ray if he could bring others from the disgraced team to play.
#FIELD OF DREAMS FULL#
Then, one evening, when Ray and his wife were arguing over their finances, they heard their little daughter say, “Daddy, there’s a man out there on your lawn.” Ray discovers that it is indeed Shoeless Joe Jackson, in full White Sox uniform. In fact, the baseball field so harmed their crop production that Ray’s brother-in-law, a banker, tries to convince him to file for bankruptcy or lose the farm. Time passed, winter came and went, and still, nothing. To Ray’s surprise, after having built the baseball field, nothing happened. While his role was later disputed, Shoeless Joe was permanently banned from the game. Nevertheless, with Annie’s perplexed blessing, Ray begins plowing under the crops, often with his daughter sitting on his lap on the tractor, which provides the occasion for Ray to tell her the stories his father used to tell him, stories of Shoeless Joe Jackson and his alleged association with the so-called “Black Sox Scandal,” in which members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox participated in a conspiracy to fix the World Series. Convincing his wife, Annie, of course is another matter. But the voice keeps haunting him, and eventually Ray becomes convinced that this is something he has been ordained to do.
Obviously he discounts the reality of this vision. One night, as he’s working in his cornfield, he suddenly hears the whispering of a mysterious voice: “If you build it, he will come.” This voice turns into a premonition of sorts: Ray sees a vision where his cornfield turns into a baseball field complete with floodlights and bleaches, and that his father’s hero, the early twentieth-century White Sox outfielder, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson, will somehow return from the grave to play once again. Ray is in effect a washed up hippie having inhaled deeply the radical idealism of the 1960s, he has only recently and quite reluctantly become a farmer. He lives with his wife, Annie, and a young daughter on a farm in rural Iowa. The film is about a man named Ray Kinsella, played by Kevin Costner. In view of the beginning of baseball season, and as the father of two Little Leaguers, I thought it appropriate to offer this tribute to one of my favorite movies, Field of Dreams. The film “Field of Dreams” beautifully portrays in a contemporary idiom the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but even more so, the grand cosmic drama to which that Parable points: that of Paradise lost and Paradise regained.
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