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

Theology on the Diamond

The tickets were just over $10 each. It was the spring of 1985, and five of us were seminarians; the sixth was my four-year-old son. We were in pretty good seats at Yankee stadium.

I think it was Rob who explained that the pitcher is the Father, the source and initiator of all the action. The catcher, someone opined, must be the Son, with the ball speeding between them being the Holy Spirit. If you had eavesdropped on our conversation you could be forgiven for thinking we had been studying theology too long.

Rob also had a plan if a foul ball came into our area. He and another guy were going to leap upon and flatten the folks in front of us, and Laura was going to catch it and give it to my son. Fortunately no foul ball ever came near us; we were saved from parsing the ethics of flattening our neighbors.

A couple of years later my son and I were back, this time with a parishioner from the Hudson Valley and his son. There was a rain delay. The players left the field, and a group of people came rolling out blue tarp over the infield. “Acolytes,” we said. John thought them very special acolytes, with a job so prestigious that you’d have to inherit it. There are, of course, always acolytes in baseball: the bat boys, for instance. But some acolytes have cooler jobs than others.

In that game, the rain persisted and finally the game was called. Not enough of it had been played for it to count as a game, and so we got a refund for our tickets. The refund came in the mail as a check, an elegant artifact with the Yankees logo. It took me awhile before I could part with it. I think it seemed like a secondary relic, something that had touched something holy.

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Many decades later, I wonder at this story. There were so many seminarians then, but today my seminary has ceased taking residential students. The tickets then were slightly expensive for us as students; today the same seats would be far out of reach. The Yankees still have a certain aura: I am writing this in a bar as they are playing the Dodgers, and I give the game more attention than I would for some other team. I have guilt about this: rooting for the Yankees was once compared with rooting for the Germans against the Poles.

 But what I most wonder at is this: is the ball the Holy Spirit, or is he the batter? It’s clear the pitcher is the Father. But after that, I don’t know. Maybe the ball is the Son. The outfielders, I think, are the archangels: alert with appreciative attention and occasionally leaping into action. What then is a run? A successful human life, maybe. And where do we find the cross? I am tempted to blame the designated hitter rule, in that Jesus was designated to die in our place.

Decades may have passed, but some theological mysteries remain.

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On the Web. Abbot Andrew of St. Gregory’s Abbey in Michigan writes on “How to Be Nothing” in an essay that resonates, in part, with what I’ve written elsewhere on God being No-thing, while challenging us to take it into our souls. For instance, Thomas Merton: “Prayer is freedom and affirmation growing out of nothingness into love." You can find the essay on pages 4–5 of the summer “Abbey Letter”: https://www.saintgregorysthreerivers.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/al294.pdf

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Out & About. I am to preach at St. James’ Church in Dallas on Sunday, June 18: the services are at 8 and 10 a.m. In between, I will be teaching a class on grief and loss. Visitors are, of course, welcome to all of this. I am looking forward to preaching on Exodus 19:2-8a, when God speaks to his people directly. The people are amazed and terrified. It will be in the next chapter that God gives them the Ten Commandments.

My “home base” in the diocese is shifting from Incarnation to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, where I am now “Cathedral Theologian-in-residence” and where I will be preaching on June 25. The “Good Books & Good Talk” seminar will continue but be at St. Matthew’s, with the next session on September 10, a Sunday, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. We will discuss Christopher Beha’s recent novel, The Index of Self-Destructive Acts. Only the location is changed. It is the same seminar format that I have had for several years. Anyone who is interested is welcome to attend; anyone who reads the book is welcome to talk!

I remain Theologian-in-residence for the diocese, which means, among other things, that I am available to visit congregations to teach and preach, to lead retreats, and anything else we figure out. If you are interested in a visit, please drop me a line: vaustin[at]edod.org.


 

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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