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

Spelling Words

    This would be harder if I were speaking to you, but we’re stuck with print. It’s a dinner party and a clutch of clergy are standing around. He says, “What’s stressed backwards?”
    I said with delight: Dessert!
    Fortunately I mumbled; the correct answer is plural. But it’s a neat discovery: lots of people are stressed out because of desserts; they can’t not eat them, they feel guilty, and so forth. And then to discover: the connection is right there, in the letters themselves.
    Another proof that English is the best language.
---
    Well, maybe it’s not, but it’s my best language. Not that there’s a lot of competition.
---
    I was the guest of a retired Church of England priest who lived in Monaco. Entering his apartment building, he left me to speak to the attendant, in Italian. I asked him how many languages he knew; I think he said eight. “My Urdu is a little rusty,” he said.
---
    What does it mean to say the Word became flesh? Is the way we play with words and turn them around and mix them up some sort of analogy of God taking on DNA and dirt under his fingernails?
---
    Susan loved crossword puzzles, and so when it came out in 2006 we went to see the documentary “Wordplay” in the local theater. There were cameos from Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, both of whom are ace crossword solvers. (Clinton starts in the upper left and moves diagonally down, finishing about as fast as he can fill in the squares.)
    The director was being driven around. The driver said—see that store? “Unkind Donuts.”
    Just move the D in the first word.
---
    I was going under for a procedure, and my doctor asked me to spell “metaphysics” backwards. (He does that to see when the anesthesia has kicked in.) I said: M, E, T, A, P, H, Y, S, I, C, S, B, A, C, K, W, A, R, D, S . . . He gave me a sidelong glance. “Okay,” he said.
    I should have asked for dessert.
---
    Out & About. I’m starting “Good Books & Good Talk,” a seminar discussion series that will take up a different book each time it meets. The first is Sunday, October 14, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas. We’ll discuss Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot; anyone who reads the text is welcome to the conversation. Registration is not necessary, but it would be helpful to have a rough idea of how many people might come: .

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

Chalk Messages

A few weeks ago, the Katy trail in Dallas had messages chalked on its concrete. There were many variations, all colorful and well-lettered, and with some wit. The first one I saw said (this from memory) “You can be strong without eating animals.” There were a number of other messages, all of them encouraging a rethinking of eating flesh or dairy. I was not offended. I like witty vegans, and I appreciated this stealth overnight campaign which itself did no harm.
    The next day the messages were clean gone; there had been rain and, one supposed, they were just washed away. As I was meditating on all this, I saw a reddish cardinal on the side of the trail. It was pecking at an insect that was trying to get away, but the cardinal prevailed.
    Score: Vegans 1, Bug-Eaters 1.
---
    I was having a salad one evening for supper, and a dinner companion looked at my plate. “Oh,” he said, “that’s what food eats.”
    Bonus point for the carnivores?
---
    This is a true story; I have a book of his published letters. Sydney Smith was a witty Church of England clergyman of the 19th century and a real socialite. Sent to the country for his health, he wrote about the pains of his exile to a city friend. I’m stuck out here, he said, where all sorts of “birds fly around, uncooked.”
    I think that makes it a four-way tie between vegans, bug-eaters, carnivores, and clergy.
---
    The original plan, it seems, had all living beings eating only fruits and vegetables and seeds and grass. Animals, birds, fish, and humans did not eat each other, nor did any living thing “that creepeth upon the earth.” There is also a suggestion that the purpose for which animals and birds came into existence was to become friends of the original, solitary human. Yet in short order that was seen not to work, and so the human’s friend was extracted from within himself, the woman whose sameness-in-difference brought delighted recognition from the man. The fall, however, brought into the world the need for rule and judgment. An early sign of this is right after the flood (Genesis 9:2-6), where the execution of punishment for murder is put into human hands.
    What is a very deep mystery is that, at the very same time as human beings were made political, they were given permission to eat animals. The binding together of human beings seems to require the strong differentiation of humans from the other living beings. I do not know why this is the case. I sense that the Bible has a deep and difficult truth here.
    Nonetheless, it is clear that the Bible is ambivalent at best about meat-eating. The permission to do so seems to be a concession. As Jesus said about divorce: the law permits it because you have hard hearts. But at the beginning it was not so.
---
    Out & About. The date for the fall theology lecture is Sunday, October 28, at 6 p.m. at Incarnation, Dallas. The topic is about rules and exceptions, and I will use assisted suicide as a way of getting at the problem. Suicide is wrong, and the Christian tradition holds rather strongly that we should not assist someone else who wishes to bring about her or his own death. But we can also imagine rather difficult cases, and so we wonder about breaking the rules—that maybe, sometimes, it would be okay. The reception that follows will illustrate the same rule-and-exception quandary, for while it is unlikely to feature meat or even fried grasshoppers, we do expect cheese.

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

12...127128129130131132133134135136 ... 172173

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.: 

Categories
Authors
Archive