Trees

An odd thing about Dallas is that you can hear the sound of leaf blowers any time of the year; their labor ceases not. Even today, there were dead leaves on the sidewalk as I walked to dinner. Trees here don’t lose leaves only in the fall; it happens year round. And the opposite happens year round also: there are always new leaves being made, if not in one tree, then in another species. Trees are continually changing.
    I’m writing this on a plaza. Beyond a parking lot there are eight or so distinct trees; beyond them, reaching above a shopping strip, a continuous bank of tall trees. They are varied in ways I lack the words to describe. Some are shaped by their sharply visible trunks; others are impressionistic blurs of green color in a roughly conical shape. I say there are about eight trees, and there are more than eight shades of green among them, from tree to tree and within each one, subtle variations that are beautiful and ineffable.
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    I think of trees as wanting to praise God. This was the conceit behind Susan’s story about trees (printed at the end of Losing Susan): that the trees wanted to know how to praise God, and he first forgot about them, but then told them to lift up their arms in silent prayer.
    They look so immovable, the trees. Everywhere they are fixed in the ground. They don’t move like rabbits or birds. But still they are alive. They shed leaves and push out new ones. They lift their arms, their branches, striving to reach up towards their maker.
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    Hallowed be thy name: I think of this as I run in the morning, not too fast, and pass so many trees. I get to know them, and can tell they have changed. It’s imperceptible to the casual passerby, but watch them for awhile and you’ll see, not just the shedding and producing of leaves, but the changes in color, in tint, in fullness. The slight growth upwards, and outwards. They look still, like rocks, but they grow, they change, like children, like neighbors.
    They want to praise God, just as you and I do.
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    Do trees know Jesus’ name? Susan gave them grief. They provided the wood for Jesus’ cradle. They gave his father Joseph a line of work. But then they had to be the material on which the dear Son died. Why did he have to die on a tree?
    So, she said, they wept. Their branches fell; they drooped to the ground; they were burdened by the deepest sadness in the world: he, the dearest one, had died on them.
    But then they awoke on Sunday, and there was the new life, the Son walking underneath and between them. Slowly, and then strongly, they raised their branches again. And once again they praised God.
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    Out & About. This Sunday, May 19, will be the “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar on Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, 6 to 7:30 p.m. If you read the novel, you’re welcome to the conversation.
    June 3-5, from Monday evening through Wednesday noon, a conference I organize (the Pro Ecclesia conference) is happening in Baltimore: “What’s the Good of Humanity?” We have many excellent speakers, and it is a good time. I would love to see you: http://www.e-ccet.org/pro-ecclesia-conference-2019-whats-the-good-of-humanity/
    If you are not going to be in Baltimore for that Pro Ecclesia conference, then you might want to check out an event at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in New York City. Rowan Williams will give a lecture, “The Embodied Logos,” under the auspices of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center, Tuesday, June 4, at 6 p.m. Information about the conference in general is here, but you might not need to register for Williams’ lecture alone:  https://forever.fordham.edu/s/1362/18/interior.aspx?sid=1362&gid=1&pgid=7133&content_id=7136&_ga=2.157923322.1799732053.1557791273-891755505.1557791273. I note the conference also includes lectures by Carolyn Chau and Peter Bouteneff, both of whom have spoken in recent years at our conferences in Baltimore.
    What theologians read. If you don’t have it, I recommend my book, Losing Susan, not for my own writing, but for the appendix which is this tree story! The Kindle or other e-book is very reasonably priced.

 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

Thy Kingdom Come

This line of our Lord’s prayer is also aspirational, a desire: May thy kingdom come! O, that thy kingdom would come!
    The whole line goes on: “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” About which, a few points:
    1) There is no difference between God’s kingdom coming and God’s will being done. God’s kingdom is that realm where his will is done.
    2) God’s kingdom exists already in heaven: God’s will is being done there. “Heaven,” as mentioned earlier in the prayer, is God’s arranging things so that he is available. It is not earth, but it is not at any remove from earth. Wherever we are, God is available to us, at hand; he is one we can call upon at any time.
    3) Jesus, when he ascended, took his seat at God’s right hand. This is known as his “session,” and the “right hand” means he shares completely in God’s authority over all things. Thus we speak of “Christ the king,” for instance. Jesus has the authority to rule the universe, and he does so, even now. The citizens of the kingdom of heaven are those who acknowledge Jesus’ rule and thus live by the Spirit. I suppose we might say they are “in heaven.”
    4) “On earth,” for now, there remains evil in its myriad forms: injustice, cruelty, infidelity, dishonesty, and on and on. Which is just to say that, in the mystery of God’s providence, the session of Jesus at God’s right hand has not yet been universally effectuated. There is a good deal of the creation, including a good deal of most human hearts (even thine and mine), which does not yet acknowledge his rule. There is no question whether Jesus is the ruler of the universe, no question whether ultimately every being will either acknowledge his rule or fall in rebellious defeat. But this is not the case yet.
    5) So “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” expresses the longing that Jesus’ rule, which is already real, would be effectuated over all things. “On earth” means, then, throughout the creation: not only in God’s presence (his available presence to us, which we call “heaven”) but also in “earth” which includes planets and stars and everything a telescope or a microscope might ever see. This line of the prayer is our desire that every wrong cease and righteousness become the air that everyone breathes.
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    With this line we conclude the opening of the prayer; all that follows are requests for things we need (bread, forgiveness, perseverance).
    Our Father is our delightful acclamation that God has given us grace to be more than mere creatures but people who can share in a sort of equality with him—people who can talk with him—people who are adopted into the family with Jesus as our brother.
    Who art in heaven is our affirmation that God, while being nothing in the world (God is no thing), is nonetheless available, at hand. Heaven is a kind-of created place, an arrangement made by God so that he could be near us.
    Hallowed be thy name is our deep sigh that everything in the universe would lift up to God. Trees, people, stars, birds, the whole creation (even cats?)—may they all praise their maker!
    Thy kingdom come is our further desire that all evil, all rebellion against God, would come to an end, and righteousness prevail in every place and every heart and every city and every school and every anything.
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    Out & About. It’s coming soon: the “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar on Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, 6 to 7:30 p.m., Sunday, May 19, and if you read it, I hope you can join us. The movie is interesting, but differs from the book—there is a theological erasure in the film—we will discuss the book.
    What Theologians Read. I’ve been enjoying Blood and Memory by Robert Benson. Benson, now retired, taught for decades at Sewanee (and elsewhere before that). These are understated, masterfully composed remembrances and reflections on boyhood in Louisiana—on family, on blood. (You can find another book by Benson, Wedding the Wild Particular, in the Dallas Public Library—also worth reading.) I will never forget his description of his father’s rattlesnake bite, at the age of 12, from which it took him months to recover and, viscerally, never. Coming to the end of that remembrance: “I have tried to look at snakes as he saw them all his life without trying: still bright with a child’s fear and bewildering pain. Some things are clear now, but much of what I remember puzzles me.” Then a page later, walking with his own boys and some friends who had stepped over a thirty-inch rattlesnake without seeing it: “It neither rattled nor attempted to escape. I shot it once with a small .38 and watched as it knotted and rattled. I told myself that I was protecting the children.” But the reader may well think he was reconciling himself to his father. Of whom, the next paragraph ends: “When he died two months before his seventy-fifth birthday, he smiled like a housebound boy given permission to go and play.” If you read this book, I’d love to hear from you.


 

Posted by The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin with

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The Rev. Canon Victor Lee Austin. Ph.D., is the Theologian-in-Residence for the diocese and is the author of several books including, "Friendship: The Heart of Being Human" and "A Post-Covid Catechesis.: 

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