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

The Days After

 There once was a rector (long ago and far away from Dallas) who would do baptisms only on Easter. That struck us as extreme—if your baby was born a day after Easter, tough: you had to wait until the next Easter to have it baptized. Nonetheless, the Easter-baptisms-only priest had a point: baptism is foundationally connected with the celebration of Jesus’ victory over death.

    Many are baptized, many confirmed on Easter Eve, often these days at the Easter Vigil. This is “meet and right” (or if you prefer, “right and just”). In baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection. Going under the water and emerging on the other side is a picture of dying and rising to new life, like the Hebrews crossing through the waters of the Red Sea, or like a baby emerging from mother church’s womb.

    A friend told me of a young man baptized at the Vigil. She knew he had been thinking about it for a long time, although she never learned what he was thinking. She went to her church and—there he was, among the people getting the sacrament. She saw him afterwards. He was glad she was there. He said (again without explanation), “Pray for me.”

    This strikes me as very important, to pray for those who have just received a sacrament especially in the days that come after. For once the candles are extinguished and the friends have all gone home, once one is back in one’s ordinary life, it is a temptation to think that nothing has changed. Or it can be worse: one may find it a time of back-sliding, of strange impulses to bad behavior. Decades ago a spiritual director said to me: “Victor, if you were the devil, where would you focus your energies?” One place, it seems to me, would be on those people who have just received sacraments. 

    The young man said, “Pray for me.” He knew his new life was only beginning. Maybe he also knew the meaning of the line at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, “Lead us not into temptation.” That line is a request that God give us perseverance to stick with him to the end of our life. It is our asking God to save us in the time of trial. It’s true what happened at the font: we have been brought out of death into life. Yet that is a promise and not yet a full reality. We need God to guide us and to defend us. We cannot get along without God.

    Which is why, even when baptismal water is still wet on our skin, it is wise to say, “Pray for me.”

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    Out & About: By the time you read this I will be on pilgrimage; the next of these epistles will come to you from the Camino Francés. The first time I walked that path I learned (at the end) that a pilgrimage is not a retreat but rather an intensification of ordinary life. On the Camino is everyone, and knowingly or not we are all walking the Way of the Cross. Or to put it the other way, Jesus, on his way to the Cross, is walking alongside all of us. That thought, I find, is at once heavy and yet encouraging.

    I will next preach on Trinity Sunday, May 26, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas. And the next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be at St. Matthew’s on June 2, on Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.

 

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Jesus: Human from Womb to Tomb

  March 25 is the feast of the Annunciation, the annual celebration of the angel’s announcement to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive and give birth to Jesus. Since March 25 fell in Holy Week this year, its celebration has been postponed to the second week of Easter. Nonetheless, it is instructive to hold the coincidence this year in mind, to ponder Jesus being conceived in the same week as he died.

    When Mary consented to the word of the angel, she conceived the Word in her womb. Jesus began his life, as all of us do, as a so-called fertilized egg. Of course this description is misleading because, once fertilized, the egg is no longer an egg but a zygote—the tiniest human being—beginning an amazing (and still often mysterious) process of cellular division and organization that cascades through the first hours and days and weeks of human life. In Mary’s case, the fertilization was a miracle done directly by God without male participation. She listened; she assented to what was asked of her; Jesus was conceived. In some paintings, this moment of divine conception is depicted by a dove, representing the Holy Ghost, flying towards Mary’s ear.

    So, although miraculously initiated, Jesus’ human life was like ours, beginning so small it could not have been seen by an unaided human eye. And it ended, too, as ours will: with a heart that stops beating and a brain that stops functioning, rendering the whole organism lifeless. After Jesus died, his body was removed to a tomb, where it was protected from desecration. This is how most but not all humans are treated after death. Some bodies are lost or abandoned, violated, eaten by vultures or suffer other such cruelty; but most are buried or cremated. Jesus was unique, however, in that his body did not remain lifeless. Rather than returning to dust, it was raised from the tomb, an out-of-time foretaste of what is to be universal at the end of time—a general resurrection.

    Human from womb to tomb, Jesus conferred special dignity on the ordinary span of human life. And when March 25, the celebration of the inception of his life, coincides with Holy Week and the journey to his death, one senses the two ends of his life touching each other. The manger and the pieta are layered and become one image: the mother cradling her baby being the mother whose lap and arms underlie the body taken down from the cross. Clergy have the privilege (there is no more appropriate word) of entering into such sacred moments. A baby is born, and we offer prayers in the hospital room or at home. A child dies, and we are again invited in. There is the mother, and there the body of her son; tears are in all our eyes, including mine, but one knows that nothing compares with the feeling in that mother’s heart: This boy of mine, whose body I now touch and weep beside, was once in my womb and once nursed in my arms.

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    This post, with a conclusion in which I reflect on the difficulty of seeing ordinary human stuff as sacred, has been published online. Please visit: www.humanlifereview.com/human-from-womb-to-tomb

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    Looking far ahead: The next Good Books & Good Talk seminar will be at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas on Sunday, June 2, at 5pm, on Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. If you’re interested in questions of AI, whether robots can have feelings and personality, this is a remarkable novel to read. 


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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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