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

School Days and God's time

In the kingdom of heaven school begins on the day after Labor Day and ends on the Friday before Memorial Day. That children are already back at school (as is the case in Texas) or will be stuck in school until late June (as is the case in New York) is a manifest and painful sign of humankind’s fall. God did not intend things to be this way.

---

Sacred time is different from the world’s time. Let me offer another instance.

The Christmas season begins with Evening Prayer on December 24, and runs to the feast of the Epiphany, January 6. In the world, however, Christmas begins in earnest sometime in November and runs hard right up to about noon on December 25 when, like an utterly strung-out marathon runner, it folds into a heap of exhaustion. 

When I was much younger (and a rector in charge of such things), I persuaded folks that we could relieve some of the pre-Christmas exhaustion by having a children’s Christmas pageant on Epiphany. It worked out okay. It was wonderful that we could delay it, and also wonderful to have a big party for the Epiphany. I think we did Evening Prayer, then pageant, then a feast on lots of sugary things, including (if memory serves, an increasingly risky proposition) an Epiphany cake. If your church has a hundred people on Sunday, to have fifty people on a weeknight is extraordinary fun.

The drawback, of course, is that by the time Epiphany arrives school has resumed, and having a church party with children on a school night is not easy. But the obvious response is: sacred time is different than secular time, and here we have a chance to teach and live out that truth (even though any particular date is of course arbitrary). God’s time is not the same as the time of the world.

(Footnote: It’s not too early to think about planning your children’s pageant for Epiphany.)

---

It is of course onery to say that, in God’s kingdom, school runs from Labor Day to Memorial Day. But I am dead serious about my point. Time in this world is out of sync with God’s time. To notice that is to be discomforted in a manner that just might help us love God, and God’s own time, more than we do.

---

Out & About. Besides reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for our seminar on September 18, I am preparing with joy my notes for the fall theology lecture, to be given Sunday evening, October 9: “The Theology of Walking,” with reflections (and maybe pictures) from the Camino de Santiago which I walked in the spring. Both the seminar and the lecture are open to anyone interested in coming, and will be at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas (probably at 5 p.m.).

On the Web. My sermon on “Cain and His Sign” can be found HERE. As you will see, it is a close reading of Genesis 4, the result of years of pondering why Cain and Abel offered sacrifices, why God did not give Cain’s sacrifice the “regard” he gave to Abel’s, and what it means that God’s character is to wait.

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

At Play

 

The old-fashioned neighborhood warning sign says, “Children at Play.” The new signs say, “Children Playing.” Need I state my preference?

Prepositions are tough to translate; from one language to the next it is nearly impossible to find an exact match. This is because even in one language what a preposition means is not a simple thing. To be “at play,” for instance, is different than to be “at the Green Giant Coffee Shop.” The Green Giant Coffee Shop is a place you can be at; play is a mode of being you can be involved with. You can be at a place and you can be at an activity.

---

These reflections were spurred by a sign, recently sighted in Phoenix: “Children and Pets at Play.” The sign stirs mixed emotions. One is glad to see the old “at play” still, well, at play in the sign-making world. Yet at the same time a new question arises. Can pets play? To the contrary, one might think, pets don’t do anything except play.

Your cat (if you have a cat, and if you do, my sympathy) helps keep down the rodent population in your home. It may catch a bird or a bunny and leave the remains on your doorstep as a present. But in its bird-catching, bunny-cornering, and mouse-pouncing activities your cat is not working. It is just being a cat. These are the sorts of things that cats do. 

But maybe it’s also true of humans. I hate to venture any human-cat analogy, of course, but nonetheless—might it be true of everything? Perhaps to be at play is just to be acting as you act when you are most yourself. In that case, play would not be a separate activity from work—or at least it would not need to be.

---

It is a thought full of wonder: for us to be “at play” is for us to be fully engaged people, people who are “at one” with what we are doing. From there it is just a small step to say that when we are “at play” we are “in play”—like a live ball in a baseball game—that is to say, when we are at play we are fully alive in the human world of God’s good creating.

Back to the warning sign. If we had to put out signs to warn when people are “in play,” those signs would be everywhere. Traffic would slow to a near-halt. 

Which might not be a totally bad thing.

---

Out & About. The Good Books & Good Talk seminar will discuss three books this fall; you are welcome to join any or all of the discussions. Sept. 18: J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Oct. 16: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. Nov. 27: Charles Darwin’s A Christmas Carol, in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas. Each seminar is on a Sunday evening, from 5 to 6:30 p.m., and meeting at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas.

On the Web. Through 8/9, a 20% discount on all paperbacks at Wipf & Stock, with code AUG22. Besides A Post-Covid Catechesis, they have many volumes in the Pro Ecclesia series that might be of interest (e.g., What’s the Good of Humanity?): wipfandstock.com

 

 

 

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

12...46474849505152535455 ... 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