Showing items filed under “The Rev. Canon Dr. Victor Lee Austin”

Doors in Cold

I’m sitting, as I like to do, at the “village” hangout near my Dallas apartment. It’s been cold here; the signs are out everywhere: “Freeze Warning: Leave your heat on! Close your windows! Let faucets drip!” Freezing weather brings out not only the exclamation marks but the essential strangeness of this city. “Close your windows”? Really? Am I living among people who might leave their windows open in this weather? Yet the injunction needs to be followed: pipes do freeze here, and we all hope that it won’t happen in our building, for the obvious reasons. 

So I’m sitting here, wearing four layers of clothing. There are two doors; I aim to be in a corner away from them both, but it doesn’t suffice. People come in and out; doors swing open and shut; and the cold comes in. I just now put back on my sweatshirt. At my apartment, the windows are closed, the heat is on, and the faucets are dripping. I like being here where I can’t hear the drip. But it’s still cold: those doors!

— 

It was only when I lived in New York City that I finally learned the value of revolving doors. They keep the wind from blowing the cold in. They prevent there being a straight shot for the outside air to invade the inside; only the confined space within the rotating doors brings outside air in. Of course, they are much more complicated than a simple glass door, and take up more room, and cost a bunch; I don’t think my village hangout should shell out for them.

Still, I feel the draft.

— 

How odd it is to live in the twenty-first century! We go through the seasons (even the very modest cold season here in Dallas, followed by the very serious hot season) as if they were essentially unreal. Inside, the temperature can be whatever we want. I can set my thermostat at 72 degrees, for instance, and enjoy inside air at that temperature all twelve months of the year. The nights are longer now, but I have electricity and can read or write after dark as well as in the day, and if I go out at 8 p.m., it doesn’t matter if it’s winter dark or slanted summer light: I can see my way and move safely to my destination. We protect ourselves from the seasons and eat and walk and work and play with little regard for the time of day or night or the presence of the sun. 

This is what people long dreamed of. They called it “conquering nature.”

— 

 Nature has been conquered and methinks it’s not altogether good for us. A frankly minor draft makes me cold and I put back on my sweatshirt, with a slight annoyance that the weather is what it is. I ignore the changing lengths of days, sleeping more or less the same hours and working the same, through the year. My one resistance, which I do with a thankful remembrance of my mother-in-law, is to change the default thermostat between winter and summer. If it’s air conditioning weather, I aim to have it close to 80. If it’s heat weather, I aim for 65 or below. My mother-in-law thought it was healthier to have less of a change between inside and outside temperature. 

But really, this is nothing for me to be proud of. It is only a minuscule reminder of what real life has been for most humans through most of time. 

Technology, which helps us in uncountable ways, still threatens harm to human nature. This threat starts long, long before smartphones and living your life on a screen. Is there a remedy? One helpful reminder of our groundedness in nature is in the prayers of the church. We have morning and evening prayers, and they are different: the times of day are not the same. We have seasonal prayers, and they are different: Easter is not Christmas. We have prayers for different stages of life, and they are different: birth is not youth is not adulthood is not the approach to death. 

And although these different patterns cover different spans of time, the church understands them as layered on top of one another. Each day is a little picture of your life: born in the morning, going to sleep at the end. Each year also is a little picture of your life: from the birth in spring (like new flowers) to the cold dormancy of winter (with your body in the depths of the grave). There are more prayers than I know that play on this pattern. Let me close with a favorite, attributed to John Henry Newman:

O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.

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 Out & About. This Sunday, January 26, I’m to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, where the Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.

Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will be discussed at “Good Books & Good Talk” also this Sunday, January 26, at St. Matthew’s. Anyone who reads the play is welcome to the conversation. We start at 5 p.m. and end at 6:30, meeting in Garrett Hall: when you leave the parking garage, it is across the beautiful close and to your right. (Coming up next: Bessie Head, Where Rain Clouds Gather, on Sun., Feb. 23.)

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About that collect: You can find it in the 1979 Prayer Book at page It first appeared in the 1928 Prayer Book (same words but fewer commas, pp. 594f.). The commentary on that Book by Massey Shepherd attributes its composition to the Rev. George W. Douglas, who put it together from phrases found Newman’s Sermons on Subjects of the Day, ##1 and 20. There is another version of it which begins, “O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life,” but Shepherd says the “troublous” clause is “not original to Newman.”

 

Did You Give Me This Book?

I always have a writing project going on. And I often try to avoid working on it. So: one day last week I was distracting myself from my project by going through one of my (too many) piles of books and journals (unread, everyone of them). And I found a book that’s perfect for the writing project I have but which I did not know about; I can’t recall ever reading about; and I have no idea where it came from.

It’s a new book, thus not one of the 40 or so that I have from the Dallas Public Library. Those books, too, I often stumble across and wonder what it was that moved me to request them. Was it a reference in an essay in The New Criterion? Was it a friend’s recommendation? Was it something I heard in a sermon or a class? That, too, happened last week: I stumbled upon a volume of essays by J. B. Priestley from my public library. About Priestley I know next to nothing but that he used to be famous in a middlebrow-kind of way and he wrote essays (as well as fiction) published in the old magazines like the Saturday Review. I enjoyed picking up the volume, but what made me check it out? It had about 30 essays from his career, which concluded in the 1960s, and I started perusing them.

One was amusing. He was complaining about the way the old are treated nowadays. We used to be seen as sources of wisdom, he said; now, we’re obsolete. Part of the problem, he writes (and remember, this was in the Sixties!)—the problem is technology. You can be pretty good through life adopting the latest thing and adapting it to your use, but at some point, it becomes too hard. You just can’t keep up.

I’m reading this, standing at my dining table, wondering what in the world he was talking about. I was in grade school for most of the Sixties, and I don’t recall any technology besides television (three channels) and record players and automobiles. I was wondering: What’s so hard about them?

And then I thought, what will grade school kids today think of me? What are they thinking of me?

—   

But that wasn’t the new book. It’s called A Time to Die, it's by Nicolas Diat (Ignatius Press), and it’s about monks in Europe, today, and how they die, how they approach death, what they do and feel and fear and think as they take care of one another as they come to death. You may recall I was writing a couple of months ago about “the art of dying,” the skill or craft that derives from the Middle Ages and in particular came out of the experience of the Black Death, the experience of plague. This art, lost in our culture at large, survives in monasteries today.

It’s a relatively new book. The author relates what he learned and saw from visits to a half-dozen monasteries about ten years ago. And it is about precisely what I think we need to recover: what’s good about being finite creatures destined to die. 

So: the monks are wary of hospitals. They don’t want to be sedated so much that they don’t know what’s going on; they want to experience dying. They also fear it, not in a way that denies their faith in the resurrection, but in a way that is real. They know it won’t be easy, not for any of them. Still they want it: they don’t want excessive medication, neither do they want heroic measures that keep the body alive at the cost of life itself. 

Read it, friends. This is precisely what we need to be thinking about as euthanasia becomes increasingly a legal alternative, and as the medical world pushes on with many ways to keep our bodies going. We need to grasp, as the Preacher saith, there is a time to live and a time to die. We need to grasp what is good about being human to the end.

 — 

In the meantime, if you gave me that book, please drop me a line.

My feeble memory will thank you.

— 

Out & About. This Sunday, January 19, I am to preach at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff in Dallas; their Eucharist is at 10:15 a.m. Then on Sunday, January 26, I’m to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, where the Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.

Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will be discussed at “Good Books & Good Talk” on Sunday, January 26, at 5 p.m. at St. Matthew’s. Anyone who reads the play is welcome to the conversation. We meet in Garrett Hall: when you leave the parking garage, it is across the beautiful close and to your right.


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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.: