Theologian's Almanac for Week of November 17, 2019
Welcome to SALT’s “Theologian’s Almanac,” a weekly selection of important birthdays, holidays, and other upcoming milestones worth marking - specially created for a) writing sermons and prayers, b) creating content for social media channels, and c) enriching your devotional life.
For the week of Sunday, November 17:
November 18 is the birthday of Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. Because her father was an entomologist, while she was growing up, her family lived for extended periods in insect-research stations in the northern Canadian wilderness. Atwood is most famous today as a novelist, and in particular as the author of The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) - but she began as a poet. For a taste of her poetry, here’s her classic, “I Was Reading a Scientific Article.”
Atwood once said: “Men often ask me, ‘Why are your female characters so paranoid?’ It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.”
November 20 is the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, born in Marshfield, Missouri, in 1889. His father encouraged him to become a lawyer, but he fell in love with astronomy, and left legal practice after only a year in the field. After World War I, he joined the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. His specialty was nebulae, and he discovered that the Andromeda Nebula wasn’t a nebula at all, but rather another galaxy - a stunning breakthrough, since at the time astronomers believed our own Milky Way to be the only galaxy in the universe. Hubble discovered 22 more galaxies over the course of his career, and noticed that each of them was moving away from the Milky Way; his data eventually demonstrated that the universe as a whole is expanding, lending observational support to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. As Stephen Hawking later put it, Hubble’s discovery was “one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century.” The Hubble Space Telescope, named in his honor, was launched in 1990; it has since transformed our understanding of the cosmos.
November 21 is the day the Mayflower Compact was signed in 1620 (November 11 in the Old Style calendar). The Mayflower had originally set sail from Plymouth, England, bound for the colony of Virginia - but fierce storms blew them off course, and they arrived instead off Cape Cod. Of approximately 100 people on board, about half were religious separatists (known as “Saints” or, later, “Puritans”) who had split from the Church of England. Since they’d missed Virginia entirely, the leaders on board thought it wise - not least because of simmering tensions between the Puritan separatists and the ship’s other passengers - to draw up a provisional system of government while they waited for a new royal charter to arrive. With the ship anchored in Provincetown Harbor, a 200-word document was drafted, based loosely on a Puritan church covenant. Each adult male had to sign the compact before they were allowed to come ashore. It was the first endeavor by European immigrants to form a democratic government in what would become the United States.
November 22 is the feast day of St. Cecilia. The story goes that, in the early third century CE, she sang to God as she died a martyr’s death - and in later years, she became the patron saint of musicians, and of music. In the sixteenth century, a large music festival to honor St. Cecilia developed in Normandy, and the custom spread to England in the next century. Both Handel and Purcell composed odes to honor her, the painter Raphael created a piece entitled, “The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia,” and Chaucer wrote of her in his Second Nonnes Tale. Today, in paintings and on stained glass, St. Cecilia is typically depicted sitting at an organ.
Looking ahead to next week, here’s SALT’s “Brief Theology of Thanksgiving.”