Theologian's Almanac for Week of October 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, October 31:

October 31 is Reformation Sunday, traditionally celebrated on the last Sunday in October, since on October 31 — exactly 504 years ago today — Martin Luther sent his “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences” (later known as the “Ninety-five Theses”) to the local archbishop. For more on this day, see last week’s Almanac.

October 31 is also Halloween, or “All Hallow’s Eve.” Here’s SALT’s “Brief Theology of Halloween.”

October 31 is also the beginning of the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland (known as COP26, since it’s the twenty-sixth “conference of the parties (COP)”). Running until November 12, this is the most important international meeting on the climate crisis yet — and so these are days for prayer, recommitment, and action. Here’s SALT’s brief essay, “Climate Crisis and the Bible.”

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, John’s astonishing story of Jesus and Lazarus.

November 2 is All Souls’ Day, honoring those who have died (especially relatives). 

All three of these days — October 31 through November 2 — are sometimes collectively called “Allhallowtide.” And in communities of Mexican heritage, many celebrate this three-day period as the Dia de los Muertos, “The Day of the Dead,” a time for gathering 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 2 is also Election Day in the United States — another day for prayer and action 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 suffused 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. 

Here’s a taste of her work: “Music.” And another: “Consider the Lilies of the Sea.”

The 1994 collection’s 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.

+ Anne Porter