Stephen

 A retired academic whom I’m getting to know lives outside his city, down a bumpy unpaved road. He can’t drive himself, so I was taking him into town. There was a man ahead of us, walking in the middle of the road. “That’s Stephen,” he said to me (I’ve changed the name). “Can we give him a ride?”
    Of course. I made room in the back seat of my rental car, and Stephen got in, speaking gratefully with an old, cigarette-hardened voice. He had about a third of an open paper cup of coffee. “I won’t spill it,” he said to me.
    We took him several miles closer to where he was going, but there our paths diverged and we had to go on. Stephen had spoken a lot along the way, asking my friend how he is doing, not hearing the answers correctly, yet moving on to rather confused talk about his own life and travels. He got out of my car, and I may never see him again in this life.
    Afterwards it struck me: I had made it possible for my friend, who has physical limitations, to do a favor to one of his neighbors—perhaps return a favor. “Does Stephen help you out?” I asked.
    “He tries to,” was the honest reply.
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    Later: “Sometimes Stephen can be violent.”
    “When he’s drunk too much?”
    “Or . . . medicines.”
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    He’s Jewish, this retired academic. It was he who pointed out to me, through his books, the importance of the end of the book of Job. When it’s all over, Job and his family and friends have a meal together. They eat together and strengthen each other, as human beings should do, and can do when they’re at their best.
    He also showed me that the importance of the sacrificial system of the Israelites is that it causes them to come together to a particular place at a particular time and, making sacrifices, eat together. Fellowship (or communion) seems to be what the Bible would teach us we are made for.
    I thought I was just giving him a little bit of help, by taking him into the city for an event at our college. But there was more at stake. Along the way, we came upon a man in the road; a stranger to me, a neighbor to him, a complicated man: someone he would not let me pass by.
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    Out & About. Sunday, September 30, I’ll be preaching at St. David of Wales on Ector Street in Denton, Texas; the services are at 8 and 10:30 am, and 5 pm. (I love this confluence of names: David, Wales, Ector, Denton. Face it: Texas has it all.)
    October 14, the first “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar, on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot. We’ll discuss the book (which means participants need to read it in advance) from 6 to 7:30 pm at Incarnation in Dallas. Reservations are not required, but do drop me a line ( ) if you think you’ll be coming—it will help preparations in the room.

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

More on That

We humans play with words: it’s part of the way we live in the world with freedom. We can imagine alternatives; we can use that amazing word “not”; we can regret what might have been; we can celebrate what has been avoided; with many emotions we can anticipate what perhaps shall be.
    I think this is one way that we imitate God. It’s not a mere equivocation that we use “word” to speak of our language and also to speak of God (as the second person of the Trinity). Some sort of analogy is going on. God’s playfulness in creation—his speaking and things come to be—is imitated by us, in a minor yet important way, when we use words.
    Words can of course shape reality. The Lord of the Rings is not “just” words: for instance, it has encouraged people to be brave and loyal; it changes the way we can think of the world. We know there are not Ents, but knowing about Ents can affect how we think of trees, of the length of life, of the joys of drinking deeply of cool, refreshing water.
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    Here’s another one you have to hear to get the play (and you have to be of a certain age). “What’s black and white and red all over?” The answer is “a newspaper”: you heard “red” but the paper is “read” all over (and back then there wasn’t color in the paper).
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    I was a small boy, maybe 8 years old, and my grandfather, a farmer, took me into town on the front seat of his truck. (No seatbelts! Those were the days!) We had to stop at a train crossing, and he read the sign aloud. “Rail Road Crossing / Look Out for the Cars.” (The old signs said that.) He went on: “Can you spell that leaving out the Rs?”
    We had moved on, and I tried: A, I, L, O, A, D, C, O . . . My grandfather was smiling broadly. When I stopped, he said: T, H, A, T.
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    He also had a puzzle-story in which the money didn’t add up. Fast-forward with me to a generation later. Father Sergei, a Russian Orthodox priest, is our house-guest for a weekend. Our children are young, perhaps about the age of his children (who were back in Russia while he studied in New York). He tells our children a riddle that has the exact same structure as the one my grandfather told me.
    Here’s the Russian version:
    There was an old man who was going to the bazaar to sell his hat. On the way, three soldiers stop him and ask him what he is doing. He says, “I am going to sell my hat.” “How much do you want for it?” they ask him. He answers, “Twenty-five rubles.” The soldiers see it is a good hat and they want to buy it, but they have a problem: it is impossible to divide 25 into three parts equally. So they say to the old man, “Here, please take 30 rubles for your hat.” The old man took the 30 rubles and sold his hat to the soldiers. But as he walked back towards his home, he thought that it was not right for him to take so much. Seeing a boy nearby, he gave him the extra five rubles and asked him to run back to the three soldiers and give them the money. The boy does so, but when he has explained his errand to the soldiers, they ask each other, “How can we divide five rubles amongst the three of us?” They decided to keep one ruble each, and to give the boy the two rubles for the job he had done. Now we may count up all the money. The soldiers each paid nine rubles for the hat; that makes 27 altogether. They gave the boy two rubles; that makes 29. But the soldiers originally paid 30 rubles. Where is the other ruble?
    Change the hat to a horse, and the rubles to dollars, and you have the version that my Oklahoma grandfather told me decades ago when I was a boy.
    Think of it: Half the world away, in a different language, the same puzzle but in different dress, the same delight at telling it. I felt like the red-dirt peanut fields of Oklahoma had become outskirts of Moscow.
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    The words that are spoken in the kingdom of God must be delightful in every way.

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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