Palm Reading

When I joined the staff of Saint Thomas Church in New York City back in the last decade, I was bemused by some of the neighboring businesses. Right next to us was a store called “Love”: it was related to the Gap, but one didn’t find “Gap” in its name, just “Love,” in sedate letters carved into stone. Across the avenue and down the street was a hangout called “Burger Heaven.” The best tables were up the stairs, but other than that it didn’t live up to its name.
    So here we were, a church somewhere between Love and Burger Heaven. We offered, one might say, both an alternative to the love you could buy next door and a taste of heaven that had no onions or mustard.
    Also down that street, across from the celestial burgers, was a storefront that said Palm Reading. It still catches me short—I came of age during the time of Gemini space launches—to realize that people resort to palm readers to try to find out things that are true. It seems to me that the one true thing to be read in your palm, if you went there, was that you had just wasted your money.
    Better to go across the street and buy a bovine sandwich.
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    But we Christians do our own palm reading.
    He is entering the holy city, and we want to honor him. We have no red carpet to roll out, but we can cut off some tree branches and spread them on the road in front of him. And we can put our own cloaks and coats down there too.
    Those branches were, of course, palms. Can you read them? Those palms say: we want to honor this person.
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    We also give voice to our joy. He comes in the Lord’s name. We know that he comes to save us.
    But another aspect of this palm reading is that we don’t really get it. We’re delighted to welcome him, but within a few days some of us will be caught up in the social mob of opposition. We won’t stick with him, and we won’t stick together. Our palms say that, too.
    Our palms get read and we see we don’t really know what heaven us, we don’t really know about love. Our palms tell us this is a lot more serious than we thought.
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    Out & About. I am to preach at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas on Maundy Thursday (April 18, 7 p.m.) and at the Easter Vigil (Sat., April 20, 8 p.m.)—both of these are traditional services.
    Recently my blog posts were on the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer, and some of you have asked me if I intend to continue. Yes, I do, and in due course I hope to write on each line.
    My lecture on the theology of suffering has been posted here: https://incarnation.org/classes/theology-of-suffering/
    My sermon on the prodigal son, “Who Says I Have Sinned?” is here: https://incarnation.org/sermons/traditional-service-who-says-i-have-sinned/
    Muriel Spark’s novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, will be discussed at the next Good Books & Good Talk seminar, Sunday, May 19.

 

Getting It Perfect

Last year was the centenary of the birth of Russell Kirk, so with my typical lag-time I was reading about him and found that he loved ghost stories, and that his fiction may have generated more royalties for him than his influential books on conservatism. So I checked into the Dallas Public Library and checked out Kirk’s 1962 thriller, Old House of Fear.
    The copy the library delivered up to me is an early hardcover printing. It has been around for half a century, obviously much read. I found it gripping, just the sort of book, I thought, that my late wife, Susan, would have loved: well-written, clean, full of twists and local lore (here, an old Scottish island), a quite unexpected love-story, and a haunting yet satisfactory ending.
    Since Susan is no longer here for me to pester about this, may I recommend it to you? Eerdmans has reprinted it, I see, in a paperback edition. It has a certain theological interest. And you might find a decent old copy in your own municipal library.
    One question it raises is the reality of ghosts, spirits, old haunting things. They appear, or are feared, in various points in the action, and yet the weird phenomena turn out to be explainable in other, more normal ways. Another question is the reality, as it were, of evil, and here the book is more ambiguous. The chief villain, who seems to be able to perform such acts as making furniture float in air, is someone, the heroine thinks, who once was good and is haunted by his memory of the tortures and killings he has perpetrated in his life. Nonetheless, he is truly bad and, it seems, irredeemably so. When he dies, his body is simply gone—never found, never washing ashore.
    A similar thing happens to the villain in Muriel Spark’s The Comforters: she drowns and there is no body. Evil is a rejection of reality—and at the end, there is nothing there.
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    So I’m reading this old book with great enjoyment, and then I find a penciled mark on a page. This is the only writing in the book. I do not like it when I find writing in library books—it seems to me a betrayal of trust for a reader to impose upon future readers his thoughts and underlinings and so on. So I was prepared to growl and pass on.
    But this penciled comment was actually a correction of grammar. It was a place where the text had “whomever” but should have had “whoever.” And the reason for the “whoever” was also indicated.
    At once I felt admiration for this public servant who had improved the text, correctly so. It was a shock to see that Kirk, or his publisher, had fallen into a rather sophisticated yet real grammatical error. Yet, apart from that one word, the entire text seemed to be perfect.
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    In the books that I own I tend to mark errors (as well as, since they are my own books, making a lot of other comments). An eminent theologian confuses Paul and John: I note it. A translator supplies a biblical reference for Augustine, but to “Cor.” rather than “1 Cor.” You can see I can be rather tedious.
    If only we could get everything right! O, the desire for perfection!
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    It haunts me. In Up with Authority, I refer to a sort of geometrical inversion that Dante performs in his Paradiso as a “slight of hand.” Where is the “e”? That wrong word (I went back to check this) was in every draft of mine, in every review by the copy-editor—I had a score of opportunities to notice it, as did others, yet none of us did. Now it’s in print.
    But a friend said: It’s only a slight error!
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    When I was a young man someone explained Navaho rugs to me. There’s always an imperfection deliberately left in them, I was told, so that the spirits won’t be trapped therein. Might Russell Kirk like the thought that there was an imperfection in his book that takes us so close to evil and uncanniness?
    And I am reminded, only Christ is perfect, his only is the perfect word.
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    Out & About. This Sunday, April 7, my “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will meet to discuss Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the short novel that amazingly got into print in the USSR in the 1960s, during a brief thaw, and that depicts human resilience in the midst of the horrendous conditions of a Soviet concentration camp. If you read the book you are welcome to our conversation from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas.
    I will be preaching next on Maundy Thursday and at the Easter Vigil at Incarnation.

 

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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.: