Theologian's Almanac for Week of April 4, 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, April 4:
April 4 is the day in 1968 that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. For the story of the sermon he preached the night before, see last week’s Almanac here.
April 4 is also the birthday of American poet and writer Maya Angelou, born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928. In 1965, working as a journalist in Ghana, she met with Malcolm X, and decided to return to the United States to help him establish his Organization of African-American Unity — but only a few days after she arrived, he was assassinated. A few years later, she agreed to work with Martin Luther King Jr. — but then he, too, was killed, on her 40th birthday. Angelou fell into a depression.
Some friends recommended her to an editor at Random House, saying she should write an autobiography — but Angelou repeatedly refused. Then her friend, the writer James Baldwin, suggested a novel strategy to the editor: call her one more time, Baldwin said, and say you’re calling to tell her that you’ll stop bothering her, and that it’s probably just as well that she’s refused, because it’s terribly difficult to write an autobiography that’s also good literature. The plan worked like a charm: Angelou immediately agreed to take on the challenge.
On writing the book, she later said, “Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass — the slave narrative — speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we.” That first autobiography became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). Angelou was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010.
Here’s wisdom from Angelou on being Christian.
April 4 is also the day in 1832 that Charles Darwin, traveling aboard the HMS Beagle, landed on the shores of Rio de Janeiro, in the midst of a five-year journey. Darwin had resolved to become a clergyman in the countryside, since many such clergy spent their weekdays as amateur naturalists — but before he completed his religious studies, he jumped at the opportunity to serve as chief naturalist on the HMS Beagle.
In one day in Rio, he collected specimens from no less than 68 species of beetles. He also came across a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a live caterpillar; the caterpillar was then eaten alive by the grubs when they hatched. This discovery shook Darwin’s belief in God. He wrote to a colleague: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
On the other hand, however, when at last he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he described the world’s stunning, evolving biodiversity in theologically evocative terms: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
April 7 is the birthday of jazz singer Billie Holiday. In 1999, Time magazine declared her song, “Strange Fruit,” the “song of the century.” The song was originally written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish school teacher, poet, and activist from New York City. A photograph of a lynching in Indiana some years earlier had deeply disturbed Meeropol, inspiring him to write “Strange Fruit,” and the song eventually made its way to the Greenwich Village nightclub where Holiday sang. As a way of raising awareness about lynching, Holiday adopted the song as her signature: at the end of her show each night, the club would bring down all the lights, pause all table service, and put a single spotlight on Holiday as she sang the haunting anthem. For a modern, wonderfully theological take on the song and its story by the virtuoso preachers Frank Thomas and Julian DeShazier, check out SALT’s Emmy-winning short film here (or press play below).
April 8 is widely celebrated as the Buddha’s birthday. Born Prince Siddhartha in sixth-century-BCE India, Gautama Buddha was raised in wealth and privilege — but at age 29, he decided to venture out beyond the palace walls. His encounters with suffering in the wider world inspired him to become a spiritual teacher, eventually outlining Buddhism’s “four noble truths”: 1) all life involves suffering; 2) the root cause of suffering is craving; 3) an awakened state free of craving (and therefore of suffering) is attainable; and 4) there is a practical path — the “Noble Eightfold Path” — toward this awakened state. There are many connections and resonances between the Buddha’s and Jesus’ teaching; explore them by reading Thich Nhat Hanh and Paul Knitter, among many others.
April 10 is the birthday of Anne Lamott, beloved author and hilarious, down-to-earth Christian disciple. Here’s some vintage Lamott, perfect for the Lent and Easter seasons (or all year round!): “I heard a preacher say recently that hope is a revolutionary patience; let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.” And here’s Lamott’s instant-classic TED talk on “everything I know for sure.”