Rev. Dorothy A. Austin

As a youth growing up in Swansea, the Rev. Dr. Dorothy A. Austin drew sustenance from what she would later call the “two powerful forces” that guided her days and set her future path — South Swansea Union Church and her maternal grandmother.

“For a scrappy, working-class, streetwise kid like myself, prone to making trouble and skipping school, the church was a haven that got us off the streets,” she wrote in “On Becoming a Theologian: In Praise of the Ordinary Life,” a 1982 Harvard Divinity Bulletin essay. “But it was more than that. It was a holy place, a dwelling place of great feeling.”

For a future preacher, though, there were just as many lessons to be learned from family.

She wrote that her grandmother Ada Gill Corner “was a magnificent storyteller. It was from her that I learned the primacy and the power of the oral tradition.”

Rev. Austin, a former associate minister for Memorial Church at Harvard who was part of the first same-sex couple to serve as house masters for one of the university’s undergraduate residences, died Jan. 15 in her Cambridge home. She was 82 and in the late stages of dementia.

An ordained Episcopal priest, she trained one eye on what everyone does day to day, and the other on the swiftly passing hours that mark the too-brief time each person spends on earth.

“You and I are alive right now, and never more mortally alive, than in this very moment,” Rev. Austin said in “The Mysteries of the Living and the Dead,” a sermon she delivered in November 2004.

“The clock is ticking,” she reminded parishioners. “Our lifespan is short; our responsibilities great and grave.”

One of her own responsibilities turned out to be taking a groundbreaking role in 1998, when Harvard named Rev. Austin and her then-partner and future wife, Diana Eck, as house masters of Lowell House. The official title has since been changed to faculty dean.

“It was a landmark to be sure,” Eck told The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, in 2023. “But it was a landmark whose time had come by that time.”

Still, Harvard appointed them more than five years before a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling legalized same-sex marriage in the state in November 2003.

The couple married the following year on the Fourth of July, a nod to the country’s religious diversity and their own backgrounds in academia.

At Harvard, Eck is a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies, emerita, and the Frederic Wertham research professor of law and psychiatry in society.

“These two women are deeply — and also widely — religious. And neither is willing to cede faith to the religious right,” the Globe’s Ellen Goodman wrote in a column published on their wedding day in 2004.

For that column, Rev. Austin told Goodman: “We shouldn’t relinquish the religious tools to the right. This is a moment of prophecy — of mercy, justice, love, comfort. We need religious traditions and people in them.”

By then, Rev. Austin had already created a career in the pulpit and at the classroom lectern.

She was a professor of religion and psychology at Drew University, commuting to and from Cambridge and the school’s Madison, N.J., campus, when she was appointed Sedgwick associate minister of Memorial Church.

Her professional initiatives in Cambridge, meanwhile, have included creating and directing the Erik H. and Joan M. Erikson Center in Cambridge Hospital’s department of psychiatry. For a time, the Eriksons shared a home with Rev. Austin and Eck.

Soon after becoming house masters of Lowell House, Eck and Rev. Austin expanded their own immediate family to include four teenage refugees from Kosovo: Amella, Aida, Kreshnik, and Sokol Zejnullahu. Kreshnik now lives in San Francisco, while the other three remain in Cambridge.

Along with her ministerial duties, Rev. Austin was a therapist.

“Dorothy had a great gift for listening,” Eck wrote in a tribute. “She was a world-class listener; it was as if she listened with all her senses, the way people write poetry or choreograph. Listening was a creative act for her.”

Dorothy Ann Austin was born in Fall River on Nov. 5, 1943, the only child of Donald Austin, who worked in commercial fishing and trucking, and Bessie Corner Austin, a millworker in Fall River.

“My mother had worked as a textile worker, in the Border City Mill, until nearly the moment of delivery, standing on her feet long hours in the deafening clatter of the looms, throwing the shuttle back and forth, winding thread for cloth,” Rev. Austin wrote in an unpublished memoir.

She added that while she was growing up, arguments between her parents were common, their tempers mercurial.

But in the past decade, Rev. Austin and her parents “jointly undertook the project” of building a house in Swansea, Eck said. “It was a wonderful reconciliation,” and Rev. Austin was with each of her parents when they died.

Though she became a gifted writer, Rev. Austin wrote that she grew up in “a world of very few books.”

The experience taught her “that there is a life-sustaining power in tales told aloud, while looking eye to eye; an exchange of knowledge, a way of making the world real that can only come through speech, through hearing the sound of the human voice.”

She graduated from the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut with a bachelor’s degree, and from the Presbyterian School of Christian Education and Union Seminary in Richmond, Va.

Rev. Austin also received a master’s from Andover Newton Theological School, a doctorate from Harvard Divinity School, and a master’s in social work from Boston University.

“She was always a counselor, largely through her ministerial practice,” Eck said. “People came to her, religious or not.”

At Harvard Divinity School, Rev. Austin taught a course in religion and psychology. She also held seminars on death and dying.

“There is no shame in grieving and loss,” she said in the November 2004 sermon. “There is only the grief itself, and the determined, day-to-day hard work it takes to rise from the depths of our suffering, to claim, out of the ruins, a life, which is ours, and nobody else’s, to live.”

In addition to Eck and the Zejnullahu siblings, Rev. Austin leaves two grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on March 25 in Memorial Church at Harvard.

Eck met Rev. Austin by chance at an organ recital in the church in January 1976. They left to have lunch together, and “by the time we got up and she walked me back to my office, I was completely in love with her,” Eck said. “It was kind of love at first sight for both of us.”

She was drawn to Rev. Austin by “the quality of her attention, her clear presence when you talk to her” — a trait that was apparent to students when they spent 21 years at Lowell House.

Along with “a great sense of humor” and talent for mimicry, Rev. Austin “had a real brilliant streak,” said Beth Terry, the longtime Lowell House administrator.

“And she had an insightfulness, I think, about the universe,” Terry said. “I keep coming back to the word charisma. She had an alertness about her. In a sense, she shone very brightly.”