Diary of a Theologian

The Turn of the Season

We’re just a few weeks away from June 21, the longest day of the year, but we are even closer to the earliest sunrise. Here in Dallas, the earliest sunrise is 6:18 a.m., and (rounded to the nearest minute) that will be the time of sunrise from June 7 through June 17. The mathematics of this remain obscure to yours truly, but the facts are clear: sunrise starts getting earlier about two weeks before the summer solstice, whereas sunset keeps getting later until about two weeks after.

Hardly anything is as simple as it seemed in elementary school.

---

In principle, I consider Daylight Saving Time to be a fraud, an effort to make clock-shifting sound sensible, like saving money or saving energy. On the other hand, I like a later sunrise. It is lovely to take a walk while the sky is still dark and the air still cool, to get out early enough to see the sky lighten. If someday the law changes and we are on DST all year round, that would be fine with me, although I hope we would find an honest name for it.

---

Every morning is like a new creation. “Morning has broken like the first morning” begins Eleanor Farjeon’s fine poem (number 8 in The Hymnal 1982). There was once a first morning, when the “morning stars”—the angels—sang for joy. There was a first birdsong and a first dewfall, and every day is God’s re-creation of that first one. 

When Israel was in the wilderness for forty years, every morning (except the morning of the Sabbath) God gave them bread from heaven, manna which they would go out to collect. About two thousand years later, it was in the morning that the women found the empty tomb.

Manna and resurrection are morning gifts. God provides our daily bread, and his raising us from sleep is a foretaste of a future raising up from death.

---

It seems wonderful to me that morning-time is slightly independent of the solstice, as if it has a bit of a mind of its own, changing time as we move through our days and seasons. Birds do not sing by a fixed clock, unlike all of us who rise with an alarm. They receive the new day and give praise as God has created them to do. We too are made to give praise every morning as the seasons turn.

---

Out & About. I am to preach at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, on June 4, Trinity Sunday, at the traditional services: 7:30, 9, and 11:15 a.m.

Super Powers

“We have a special bookshelf,” they were explaining to an older visitor. “When you take a book, there’s another book behind it! And when you pull out that book, there’s another book behind it! And when you pull out that book, a monster jumps out to eat you!”

---

The four-year-old was holding some Legos about an inch in front of the adult’s nose. “Can you see this?” No, the adult said, they’re too close to my eyes. He held them right up by his own eyes. “I can see them,” he said. The adult explained that when you get older your eyes aren’t able to see things you used to see. “Why?” he wanted to know. Because, the adult said, when you grow up you lose your super powers. The child pondered this. “Why?” he said again. The adult said that’s the reason adults can’t see all the things that children see; they’ve lost their super powers.

---

Fourteen years old, she was at a promotion ceremony from middle to high school. Her school—both middle and high—is part of the classical education movement, and it sets itself forth as dedicated to the true, the good, and the beautiful. There were a hundred-some students there, all sitting with their families. One of the speakers—a graduating senior—was giving advice. Hang onto your friends, she said. Talk to your parents. Make your bed. Read your books. You will meet heroes and villains. Among the latter she mentioned Viktor Frankenstein.

(Yours truly winces at the mention of Frankenstein’s Christian name.)

Another speaker had lost part of her family in an awful car crash. She was told she’d never walk again. She had to grow up fast—and manifestly, through hard work and much support, she was now walking. She said her childhood died the day of that car crash. And yet, she said, our childhood never dies.

The grandfather stole a glance at his granddaughter, losing her childhood and yet, somehow, not yet, not altogether. 

---

When he was a boy, the adult remembers, he felt angels at night sometimes. They were there in the bedroom. He thinks he occasionally saw them, but recalls no particular message, just the sense of a presence.

---

If any boy ever had super powers, Samuel did. In the night he heard God calling his name, but he didn’t know it was God. The adult taking care of him figured it out. He told Samuel to stay in his bed and say: “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” 

And the question is, Were Samuel’s super powers in what he heard—or in how he responded? 

---

This adult thinks that all our childhoods continue forever in that part of us which remains alive to that monster who might leap from a bookshelf, which has eyes to see a wounded child walk, which thinks God might have a conversation with us.

At the airport, I heard an announcement from the gate for Austin Powers to come forward. I resisted the impulse.

---

Out & About. I am to preach at Church of the Incarnation, Dallas, on Trinity Sunday, June 4, at the traditional services: 7:30, 9, and 11:15 a.m.