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

Tourist Destination?

Someone was writing about her trip to Greenland. She had wanted to go to an out-of-the way place, “off the beaten track,” as the trite phrase puts it. Google that and you get, among other things, Greenland. The problem is, as soon as a place “off the beaten track” is discovered, the path to it quickly becomes quite beaten indeed. She wrote of her cruise ship docking at a coastal town. A few thousand people lived there; Greenland has a tiny population. Let’s say there were 5,000 people in the town. More than a thousand were on her ship, disembarking for a few hours.

Imagine the disruption to the local life. Imagine also the difference in the visitors’ experience. For a few hours, they became a huge percentage of the people in that town. They saw things; they spent money; they got back on the ship.

It has happened all over the world. In an old novel you might read of someone visiting Paris and going to see the Mona Lisa. He might stand there, pondering it, almost meditating, for several minutes—largely alone. Now (I’m told) the crowds are thick. Raise your cellphone in the air, snap, and move on.

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When things become popular, they are changed by the crowds who come. This has happened to Christianity, time and again. Before A.D. 312, the Christian faith had no official protection; after that, it was a tolerated religion in the Roman empire. The change happened to make it easier to become or remain a Christian; there were no longer persecutions for being a Christian, and the old social discouragements had gone away. The result, of course, was a lot more people “in church,” while at the same time they were there on much easier terms. Although there is nothing good about persecution in itself, one could still imagine people longing for the “old days” when to be a Christian was more serious and sometimes dangerous.

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We may be going through the opposite in America. With amazing rapidity, the proportion of our fellow citizens who call themselves Christian has dropped from about 90% to about 60%. There is just a lot less cultural approval of Christians. The drop can be attributed, and is, to many different things. To my mind, American culture as a whole tends to see Christianity as “behind the times.” Culture has eagerly accepted many things that Christianity has hesitated over. You can talk about this in terms of civil rights, or of scientific advances, or of various matters of sexuality. Western culture believes in what one wag has named “Progress Theology,” a conviction that things are moving ineluctably in a certain direction and everyone needs to get on board. This Progress Theology, however, is hardly biblical.

As culture provides fewer incentives to be known as a Christian, fewer people are. One result of this reversal may turn out to be greater Christian clarity about what it means to be Christian. We will have a stronger sense of how we live in a dialectic with culture, sometimes in alignment, sometimes out of step. Consequently, we will need to articulate more clearly what are the truths of Christian faith, including Trinity and the Incarnation and the consequences of living with sin in a fallen world. (That, by the way, is the principal strike against Progress Theology. If the times are fallen, it might be prophetic rather than retrograde to be “behind the times”!). Above all, we will need urgently to unpack and champion the dignity of human beings as God’s image.

Admittedly, it must have felt better to be in a church in the 1950s with exploding Sunday schools and cultural prestige and the “God Box” on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But, friends, in our times right now, there is no shortage of exciting things that God has for us to do. We may become, as it were, a religious Greenland, an off-the-beaten-track place that people will be newly interested in.

Christianity expands and declines, again and again, through history. May we be bold and faithful in the time before us!

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Out & About: September 14 the Good Books & Good Talk seminars resume. Our first discussion will be on Nicolas Diat’s lovely account of his visits to various French monasteries, A Time to Die. Monks preserve older understandings of caring for each other at the end of life—and of what happens at the moment of death and thereafter. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even if you cannot join the conversation that Sunday, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

The subsequent seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.

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On the Web: Recently for the Living Church Covenant page, I wrote about the unity of the two great commandments (to love God and to love neighbor). It’s one of those great questions that can stick with you for decades. What was new to me this time in thinking about them, is that we can see them united in God himself. God wants us to love him—which he makes possible by becoming our neighbor. Here’s how I concluded the column:

“The fourth and final thought comes from the Good Samaritan story. There was a man beaten, robbed, left for dead on the side of the road. Some people pass him by; one man, a Samaritan, stops. Although this story was prompted by the lawyer’s question (‘Who is my neighbor?’) Jesus ends the story with a different question. He asks, ‘Who proved himself a neighbor?’ By making this significant change, Jesus directs us not to ponder who is our neighbor but ‘How can I be neighbor, how can I prove myself a neighbor?’ A further question we might ask is, ‘Who has done this? Who, in human history, has proven himself a neighbor?’

“God did not ask himself, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ God did not try to figure out who was his neighbor. He couldn’t—the creator has no neighbors; only creatures have neighbors. But he did set himself the task of proving himself a neighbor to us.

“[And so] it happened: God arranged it that he would come over beside us. He arranged to put healing oil on our wounds. He made provision for our care. He went away, but he promised to return. On the lips of Jesus, the Good Samaritan story (in addition to all the other things it is about) is about Jesus himself, God in the flesh, God who has pulled up beside us.

 “By becoming the neighbor, God loved us and made it possible for us to love him and to love our neighbor. And when he returns, he will be our neighbor forever.”

You can read the whole thing here: https://livingchurch.org/covenant/90964/

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

Dog Days

 A wondrous discovery: in the calendars for the 1552 and 1559 Prayer Books (and perhaps others, I don’t know), there are indications that the Dog Days begin July 7 and end September 5. Who knew that the dog days of summer were ecclesiastical? 

They are hot and sultry days, the worst of summer for us in the northern hemisphere. I’ve long known the term, “dog days of summer,” and assumed it to mean the days when dogs do nothing but stretch out on a cool spot, perhaps under the porch, their tongues hanging out. They were days when even the dogs were lethargic.

This is not altogether wrong, though the Farmers Almanac and other reputable sources (ahem, I’m looking at you, Wikipedia) associate them with the season when the Dog Star (Sirius, the brightest star in the sky) rises and sets with the sun. This happens a bit after the summer solstice. Some ancients found this a happy season (the Egyptians had their farming soil replenished from the overflowing Nile) while others found it a time of disease and distress. But, for good or ill, they were the hardest days of the summer, and so they are.

Dog Days may have been an academic term; at least, in the Prayer Book calendars I’ve examined, they are in the same lineup as the beginning and end of various academic terms: Michaelmas, Hillary, Epiphany, and Trinity terms are noted. The Dog Days begin just after Trinity ends. We note, perhaps with amazement, that the church calendar in the mid-16th century included the beginning and end of school terms!

So I suppose we could consider the Dog Days as a “non-academic” academic term, the days when it is too hot and sultry to expect learning to occur. How odd it is, then, for us in many parts of the U.S. to have school resume this week (or soon)! Yet, in a sense, how wonderful to think of your whole calendar, that is to say, all the things you do in your life, being part of one calendar whose backbone is the Christian story. That Christian story is inclusive of your whole life, even the Dog Days when you feel like doing nothing at all.

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Out & About: I am to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas this Sunday, Aug. 17; the services are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.

September 14 the Good Books & Good Talk seminars resume. Our first discussion will be on Nicolas Diat’s lovely account of his visits to various French monasteries, A Time to Die. Monks preserve older understandings of caring for each other at the end of life—and of what happens at the moment of death and thereafter. I highly recommend this book to everyone, even if you cannot join the conversation that Sunday, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s Cathedral.

The subsequent seminars will be Oct. 19 on Dr. Wortle’s School by Anthony Trollope, and Nov. 9 on Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot.

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On the Web: There’s a piece of mine called “The Life of Chuck,” about the recent film of that name. Here’s the first part of my review:

“It’s hard to know what to do with a film that begins with the end of the universe. The Life of Chuck places us in a generic urban/suburban world where normal things are starting to unravel. In a traffic snarl, a schoolteacher (Marty) sees a billboard with the picture of an accountant and the words, ‘Charles Krantz: 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!’ We also see scenes of Marty in his classroom telling parents that their children are not doing well. The Internet no longer works; he has difficulty explaining that we should still be able to expect students to read and learn and do homework without computers. At home, Marty’s television broadcasts news of massive disasters across the U.S. Earthquakes have sent large parts of California into the sea; there are fires, and so on. The place of the traffic snarl is now a huge sinkhole. Countless cars have fallen into it and driving in the city has become impossible. People abandon their cars and trudge miles to get back home.

“When his cellphone stops working, Marty walks for hours to the home of his ex-wife, Felicia. On the way, the power flickers, then goes out. Streets are dark. Yet, glowing on every glass window, like ghostly apparitions, are the words he first saw on the billboard: ‘Thanks, Chuck!’ Meanwhile, we see a dying man surrounded by loved ones telling him he has done well despite suffering a brain tumor. He is 39 years old. He is Chuck.

“Marty and Felicia, sitting in her backyard, can see scores of stars because all the city lights are extinguished. Then the stars themselves begin to disappear. They hold hands. One of them says ‘I love you’ just as the universe ends.

“That is the first act, although the film calls it Act 3.”

You can read the whole thing here: https://humanlifereview.com/the-life-of-chuck/ 

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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