Theologian's Almanac for Week of November 1, 2020
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 1:
November 1 is All Saints' Day, a festival celebrating all the saints, known and unknown. Here’s SALT’s commentary on this year’s All Saints’ Day passage from the Gospels, Matthew’s story of how Jesus began his most famous sermon.
November 2 is All Souls’ Day, honoring those who have died (especially relatives).
October 31 through November 2 are sometimes collectively called “Allhallowtide.” And in communities of Mexican heritage, many celebrate this period as encompassing the Dia de los Muertos, “The Day of the Dead,” a time to gather to pray, remember, and commune with friends and family members who have died.
November 1 is also the day Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling was first revealed in 1512. Michelangelo had worked on the ceiling for four years, illustrating themes from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, including the famous panel, “The Creation of Adam” (though “The Creation of Eve” is actually the featured, centermost image). The German writer, Wolfgang von Goethe, wrote that without seeing the Sistine Chapel ceiling, “we cannot know what a human being can achieve.”
November 3rd is Election Day in the United States — a day for prayer if there ever was one! Here’s the artist Judy Chicago’s “A Prayer for Our Nation.”
November 6 is the birthday of American poet Anne Porter, born in Sherborn, Massachusetts, in 1911. She wrote poems avidly as a young woman, often on theological subjects or inflected with a spiritual sensibility, but submitted only a few for publication. She and her husband, the painter Fairfield Porter, were active in the New York art scene of the 1940s and ’50s, and he painted many portraits of her over the course of their life together, living on Long Island and raising five children. After Fairfield’s death, Anne turned again to her poems and began revising them anew. A dear friend, the poet David Shapiro, secretly showed the drafts to a press — who promptly offered to publish them. An Altogether Different Language appeared in 1994, when Anne was 83 years old; it was named a finalist for the National Book Award. The title poem is a meditation on St. Francis’ little stone chapel in Assisi:
“An Altogether Different Language”
There was a church in Umbria, Little Portion,
Already old eight hundred years ago.
It was abandoned and in disrepair
But it was called St. Mary of the Angels
For it was known to be the haunt of angels,
Often at night the country people
Could hear them singing there.
What was it like, to listen to the angels,
To hear those mountain-fresh, those simple voices
Poured out on the bare stones of Little Portion
In hymns of joy?
No one has told us.
Perhaps it needs another language
That we have still to learn,
An altogether different language.