Diary of a Theologian

Trust in Institutions

I am thinking about the CDC. Monday last week they not only issued their confusing message about masks, they said don’t travel to Spain. The State Department accordingly said, with regard to Spain, “Do Not Travel.” It is their highest cautionary level. Although I could still go on my planned pilgrimage of walking the traditional Camino Frances to Santiago de Compostela—Spain would admit me, being fully vaccinated, and the route is open—I have decided to delay it (again).
    In my mind is the voice of an old New York friend, who some years ago said, “Victor, you ought to go while you still can.” The Grim Reaper ever lurks in the shadows. On the other hand, another friend has pointed out that anybody can walk the Camino; what you need to do is go at the pace that is right for you. (So, don’t worry about the delay.) Yet another friend, a person confined to a wheelchair, wants to go someday; and “with a little help from his friends” (forgive the Beatles’ near-quote) he could.
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    A bit more than a year ago, I read in The New Atlantis, a journal of science and culture, this old saying: Trust is gained in spoonfuls but lost in buckets. It is hard to build up trust yet mighty easy to lose it, and having lost it, exceedingly hard to regain it. It is not a judgment but simply a fact to say that major scientific institutions have lost trust in the past year. They will find it hard to regain.
    Thus, by presumption, I bristle at new CDC guidelines. I have seen the New York Times (even the NYT!) mock the CDC for bone-headed declarations; one NYT headline dripped with irony when it said (of a long-delayed accommodation to the exceedingly flimsy evidence of outdoor transmission), “CDC decides to follow the science.”
    And yet, and yet . . . just because trust has been lost does not mean that any particular declaration is wrong. If Covid is on the increase in Spain (as it is), and if Spain is, relatively to us, under-vaccinated, then it seems good to delay my pilgrimage to the spring, grim reaper to the contrary notwithstanding.
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    We need to be honest with one another and to expect clarity and humility from such institutions as the CDC. At the same time, we need to be open to the possibility that even a much-beleaguered institution can still get something right. We need to be willing to acknowledge, indeed to hope to find, those spoonfuls by which trust can be reestablished.
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    Which is just another way to say: Because God has made us social beings, there is an essential place for authority in our lives. (I seem to be unable to escape from my first book, Up with Authority.)
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    Out & About. For the first time, I have preached on the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son. It seems to me that he is in danger of squandering—of throwing away, which is something like the literal meaning of being a prodigal—the most important things of all. (So he has a claim of being the “prodigal” too.) Preachers who will be visiting this parable in Lent of 2022 might want to bookmark this for homiletic provocation! I called it, “Can this family be one family?” You will be able to find the sermon here: https://incarnation.org/worship/sermons/#speakers=victor-lee-austin

The Walking Mind

It seems that when we walk, we are creating in our brains some sort of map of the world. One theory today is that the move to bipedalism – standing up on our own hind legs and starting to get around on them – was a key moment in human evolution. Whether that theory is correct is disputed (we are hardly the only bipedal creatures – some dinosaurs and all birds share this, with varying evolutionary results). But it surely is significant: we humans have been flying through the air (and now just beyond the air) for hardly a century; likewise with cars and trains. Compared with hundreds of thousands of years, a century is a mere rounding error.

So it makes sense to think of our “thinking” as deeply connected to walking. If we peel off the headphones and simply walk, what happens?

Two sorts of things. First, one thinks about the walking itself. There are things to notice: clouds, plants, the condition of the trail, a water puddle, and so forth. A few weeks ago, on a hot Saturday morning on the Santa Fe Trail in Dallas, a thin, long snake slithered onto the concrete ahead of me. I stopped; I could not recall the last time I saw a snake. Oncoming walkers and bicyclists continued on, and the snake was still. It seemed to be making its own calculations regarding traffic conditions. Shortly, it turned in a tight half-circle and returned to the grass it came from.

A walker notices things and sometimes is caught up short by what he notices. These are these concrete, actual things that present themselves to the senses. But a walker thinks also about many bigger things. Some of them are memories. Some are problems that he turns over, trying to understand. Ideas, lines of music, events of the past, relationships, friendships, disagreements: in the midst of walking, these things emerge into consciousness; and sometimes the walking person enters into a sort of meditative trance.

One hypothesis is that walking’s key human work is in the movement back and forth from the concrete, immediate, sensual business of walking to the mental images and thoughts. When we walk we don’t just see some of the beauties of the world, and we don’t just work through some thoughts, but we do both those things better.

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As I draw close to beginning a long walk that is a pilgrimage, it seems to me there is one thing to add to all this. A pilgrimage is a walk undertaken with a deliberate but unseen walking partner. A pilgrim intends to walk with God, intends to speak with God and hopes to hear God’s voice. From the snake on the path to the sudden recollection of an event on the playground (not recalled to mind for fifty years), the pilgrim’s companion is there to help him understand, to help him see this whole human path with the love of his maker, defender, redeemer, and friend.

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Out & About. This Sunday, August 1, I am to preach at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas at the traditional services (7:30, 9, and 11:15 a.m.).

“Good Books & Good Talk,” an occasional seminar, will return October 24 with Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Anyone who reads the book (it’s a famous play) is welcome to the conversation, which will be at Incarnation in Dallas that Sunday evening.

The previous Sunday evening, October 17, I will give my fall theology lecture on the subject of borders.