Theologian's Almanac for Week of February 16, 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, February 16:
February 16 is the day in 1978 that social networking began. The Internet was in its earliest days, and two hobbyists - Chicago-based computer geeks Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss - came up with the idea of a public “bulletin board” where members could dial in and post messages, much the same way a family or community might communicate by posting slips of paper with pushpins on a corkboard. And just like that, the online social network was born.
February 16 is also the day in 600 that Pope Gregory, the story goes, recommended “God bless you” as the appropriate response to a sneeze. The plague was at its height in Europe, and the idea was that the blessing would help protect the sneezing person from sickness and death. As the plague spread, so did the custom.
February 17 is the day the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1863. Four years earlier, Swiss national Henri Dunant, while traveling on a business trip in northern Italy, witnessed a bloody battle in the Italian war for independence. What struck Dunant was that the nearly 40,000 people killed or wounded were virtually left alone on the battlefield; no one was caring for them. Dunant immediately began organizing the locals to help all the victims, no matter which side of the conflict they were on. The project overwhelmed him; he eventually abandoned his business and fell into bankruptcy. And in 1901, Dunant was awarded the very first Nobel Peace Prize.
February 18 is the birthday of American novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. After a stint teaching at Howard University, she worked as an editor at Random House, raising her two sons as a single parent in New York. And then she began a project: while her boys were asleep late at night or in the early morning, she would work on a novel about a black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who desperately wanted blue eyes. After many rejections, The Bluest Eye was finally accepted for publication in 1970; Morrison was 39 years old.
Still working as an editor, she helped compile The Black Book, an anthology of archival materials documenting the African-American experience. Among those materials was a short article about Margaret Garner, a young mother who escaped enslavement in 1856 - and when the enslavers caught up with her, she killed her two-year-old daughter in order to spare her from slavery. Morrison decided to write a novel inspired by Garner’s story because there were no memorials to the millions of victims of enslavement. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she said. “And because such a place doesn’t exist… the book had to.” Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Morrison received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993.
Here’s Morrison (from her novel, Paradise) on God and love.
February 18 is also the birthday of Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1883. He’s best known for Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, the latter of which was banned by the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches for portraying Jesus as tempted to cast off his divinity and lead an ordinary human life. Kazantzakis himself, however, insisted that “every free man who reads this book, so filled as it is with love, will more than ever before, better than ever before, love Christ.”
February 19 is the day in 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the order that ended up authorizing the internment camps in which 120,000 people, more than half of them Japanese-American citizens, were forcibly detained. In 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that the order was a “grave injustice” resulting from “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” President Reagan offered survivors an apology and $20,000 each in 1988.
February 20 is the birthday of photographer Ansel Adams, born in San Francisco, California, in 1902. Adams had difficulty sitting still and focusing in school, and was expelled several times. “Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside,” he later recalled. “I longed for the outdoors.” Exasperated, his parents began homeschooling him at the age of 12 - and when he was 14, they gave him two life-changing gifts: a Kodak #1 Box Brownie camera, and a family trip to Yosemite National Park. Adams was completely enthralled, and would return to the park every summer without fail for the rest of his life. His images of American landscapes are now among the most famous photographs in the world.
February 22 is the anniversary of the death of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1911, abolitionist, suffragist, poet, novelist, and one of the first African-American women to be published in the United States. (Check out her portrait at the top of this post!)
Here’s a taste of her advocacy:
Addressing the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1866, Harper said, “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro... You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me... While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”
And here’s a taste of her poetry, an excerpt from “Bible Defense of Slavery”:
A “reverend” man, whose light should be
The guide of age and youth,
Brings to the shrine of Slavery
The sacrifice of truth!
February 22 is also the birthday of Edna St. Vincent Millay, born “between the mountains and the sea” in Rockland, Maine, in 1892. She was one of the most celebrated poets of her time, a free spirit and a romantic. In her younger days, she lived in an attic apartment on Bedford Street in New York City that was nine feet long and six feet wide; it was the narrowest house in the City, and today is known as “The Millay House.” She later lived in “Steepletop,” a sprawling property in Austerlitz, New York. After her death, the young poet Mary Oliver made her way to Steepletop to pay homage - and ended up staying there for seven years, helping Millay’s sister, Norma, organize the poet’s papers.
Here’s a taste of Millay’s theology (you can feel the influence on Oliver!):
God's World
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, - Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, - let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.