Theologian's Almanac for Week of January 31, 2021
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, January 31:
January 31 is the birthday of Thomas Merton, born in Prades, France, in 1915. While a student at Columbia University, he decided to write his master’s thesis on William Blake, and found himself deeply influenced by him. After a few more years of study, he converted to Christianity, and in 1941 entered a Trappist abbey in Kentucky, where he lived for most of his life. He wrote in his diary: “Going to the Trappists is exciting. I return to the idea again and again: ‘Give up everything, give up everything!’” His superior at the monastery noticed his talent for writing, and encouraged him to pursue it; Merton wrote more than 70 books over the course of his lifetime, along with 2,000 poems and many essays and lectures. Many of his books combine theology, politics, and interreligious dialogue, and he’s perhaps best known today for his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which ends with the line: Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi (“Here ends the book, but not the searching”).
February 1 begins Black History Month in the United States and Canada. Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom celebrate it in October.
February 1 is the feast day of St. Brigid, who died in Ireland around 525. She founded the co-ed monastery of Kildare, meaning “Church of the Oak.” Her name means “the exalted one,” and she was well known for her down-to-earth hospitality: hosting unexpected guests, the story goes, she once turned her bath water into beer. Now considered Ireland’s second patron saint (the other being Patrick, of course), she’s also patron of poets, scholars, blacksmiths, and healers.
February 1 is also the birthday of American writer Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. Growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, the public library was one of the only integrated public buildings in the city, and Hughes spent as much time there as possible. As he later put it, “Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”
In 1926, at the age of 24, Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, and a widely-read essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a spirited defense of African-American arts and culture. He wrote: “Then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority — may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let's dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.”
Langston Hughes went on to write 16 books of poetry, more than 20 plays, 10 collections of short stories, not to mention essays, novels, children's books, song lyrics, and radio scripts. At times he was a blistering critic of how religion, and Christianity in particular, could be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
He became one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. The subject matter of his life’s writing, as he once put it, is the people he grew up with: “Workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago — people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter — and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”
February 3 is the birthday of American author, painter, and illustrator Norman Rockwell, born in New York City in 1894. Rockwell painted more than 4,000 original works over the course of his career, including some of the most iconic theological images in American popular culture. Among these are “Saying Grace,” “Freedom of Worship,” and “Golden Rule.” In the early 1960s, Rockwell had something of a conversion with regard to racism and social justice in the United States, and the result was the classic, “The Problem We All Live With,” inspired by the courage of Ruby Bridges.
February 3 is also the observed birthday of explorer Ferdinand Magellan, born in Sabrosa, Portugal, in 1480. He is widely known as the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a single journey — but in fact, he never made it home. Magellan departed westward from Spain in 1520, with a fleet of five ships and a combined crew of 270 souls, sailing across the Atlantic and around what we now call the “Strait of Magellan” at the southern tip of South America, and then out across the Pacific Ocean (which Magellan named) all the way to the Philippines — where Magellan was killed, after becoming embroiled in a local conflict.
In 1522, only one of the original five ships made it back to Spain, with a crew of only 18 or 19 of the original 270 on board — led by Juan Sebastian Elcano, who should be the one remembered as having actually completed the entire round-the-world journey. Still, Magellan’s attempt stands as an icon for passionate, adventurous commitment. What in our lives, we might ask, are we willing to pursue even if we lose virtually everything along the way — and even if, in the end, we fall short of the destination, though others reach it?
February 4 is the birthday of Rosa Parks, born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913. In the 1940s and 50s, she served as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, working as a civil rights organizer and activist.
In August of 1955, black teenager Emmett Till, visiting relatives in Mississippi, was brutally murdered after allegedly flirting with a white woman. Parks attended a mass meeting at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery on November 27, 1955; the meeting’s speakers addressed the Emmett Till case at length, including the news that Till’s two murderers had just been acquitted. Parks was deeply disturbed and angered by the verdict, not least because Till’s case had received such widespread public attention, far more than other cases she and the Montgomery NAACP had worked on over the years. Just four days later, she took her famous stand on that fateful Montgomery bus ride. She later said that when the driver ordered her to move, “I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.”
It wasn’t the first time Parks had taken a stand: “My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest. I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.” Indeed, one day in 1943, Parks boarded a bus and paid the fare — but the bus driver, a tall, blond man named James F. Blake, demanded she follow city rules and re-enter the bus again through the back door. Parks exited the bus — and Blake promptly drove off without her. As she waited for the next bus to come, Parks vowed never again to ride with Blake.
Nearly a decade later, on December 1, 1955, four days after hearing that Emmett Till’s murderers had been acquitted, Parks found herself on a bus driven by none other than James F. Blake. She sat in the black section, but when the white section filled up, Blake demanded that the four black passengers nearest the white section give up their seats. The other three black passengers reluctantly moved, but Parks did not. She recounted the scene: “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I'm not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’”
Even today, many picture Parks on that bus as an old woman tired after a long day of work. In her autobiography, My Story, Parks writes, “People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” You can listen to Park’s own account of these events here, recorded just four months after her arrest.
Rallying around Parks’ case, the Montgomery bus boycott began the next day — and after more than a year, it was successful; the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated transportation was unconstitutional. But Parks endured significant hardships along the way, both during and after the boycott. She was unjustly fired from her department store job. She received an almost constant stream of death threats, so many that she eventually left Montgomery to seek work elsewhere, ultimately moving to Detroit. There she served as secretary and receptionist for Representative John Conyers, befriended Malcolm X, and became active in the Black Power movement.
In 1995, she published her memoir, Quiet Strength, focusing on her Christian faith. She insisted that her abilities to love her enemies and stand up for her convictions were gifts from God: “God has always given me the strength to say what is right.” A devoted member of St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery, Parks taught Sunday School and regularly helped prepare the Lord’s Supper. “I had the strength of God,” she said, “and my ancestors.”
When she died in 2005 at the age of 92, she became the 31st person, the first woman, the second African American, and the second private citizen to lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. More than 50,000 people came through to pay their respects. Her birthday is celebrated as Rosa Parks Day in California and Missouri; Ohio and Oregon celebrate the day on December 1, the anniversary of her arrest.
One last story: In 1994, the Ku Klux Klan applied to sponsor a section of Interstate 55 near St. Louis, Missouri, which would mean the Klan’s name would appear on roadside signs announcing the sponsorship. Since by law the state could not reject the application, the Missouri legislature came up with a novel solution: they voted to name that same section of road, “Rosa Parks Highway.” Asked for her thoughts on this honor, Parks is said to have replied, with a gleam of mischief in her eyes, “It is always nice to be thought of.”