Theologian's Almanac for Week of March 14, 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, March 14:

March 14 is the birthday of Albert Einstein, born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879. As a young boy, he was fascinated with how a compass needle responds to unseen forces — and while he remained curious and thoughtful throughout his youth, his grades in school were unremarkable. When he graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, he was the only one in his graduating class who wasn’t offered a teaching job — and he then spent two years unsuccessfully looking for one. In the end, he gave up and took a job as a technical assistant at the Swiss patent office.  

As it turned out, however, the job was perfect. Not only did it afford him a good deal of free time to work on physics, it also exercised his mind as he examined and evaluated new inventions: “Working on the final formulation of technological patents was a veritable blessing for me,” he said. “It enforced many-sided thinking and also provided important stimuli to physical thought.” Through this work, Einstein was exposed to a constant stream of mechanical, practical, and entrepreneurial thinking about electric light, clocks, electromagnetism, and more. He later called the patent office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.” 

And during his two-year job search, Einstein took out an ad offering his services as a physics tutor — and that led to meeting Maurice Solovine, a Romanian philosophy student. The two hit it off immediately, ditched the tutor-student arrangement in favor of friendship, and formed a small discussion group they dubbed the “Olympia Academy,” gathering regularly in Einstein’s apartment, eating sausages, cheese, and fruit while debating the biggest ideas of the day.

With these various influences swirling and interacting in his mind — the practical insights from the patent office work and the philosophical insights from the Olympia Academy discussions — Einstein reflected on various “thought experiments” in theoretical physics at his clerk’s desk. In the year 1905, while still a patent clerk, he changed the field of physics four times with four groundbreaking papers on a particle theory of light, on molecules in liquid, and on “special relativity,” including the equation that made him famous: E = mc². E is energy, m is mass, and c stands for what Einstein argued is the universe’s constant: the velocity of light.

Albert Einstein, the quiet child and poor university student who couldn’t find a teaching job, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. He once said, “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”

He also said: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.”

March 15 is the day in 1965 that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave a speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress, calling for legislation to safeguard voting rights for all Americans, and in particular for Americans of color. Just eight days earlier was “Bloody Sunday,” the day 600 people set out on a march from Selma, Alabama, demonstrating for voting rights and protesting the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a civil rights activist and Baptist deacon. After six blocks, as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers were met by local and state law enforcement, who brutally attacked them clubs and tear gas. ABC News televised the violence, and during the ensuing week, the public became increasingly concerned. The night before, Johnson decided to make a public address to Congress, giving his head speechwriter, Richard Goodwin, less than a day to write it. The speech should use “every ounce of moral persuasion the presidency held,” he said — and Goodwin structured the speech around the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” 70 million Americans watched on television. Referring to the marchers, Johnson declared, “Their cause must be our cause, too, because it’s not just Negroes, but really, it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”

March 15 is also the ides of March. The word “ides” refers to the full moon in the Roman lunar calendar, occurring on the 15th of the month in March, May, July, and October, and on the 13th in the other months. In some ancient calendars, the Ides of March signified a new year. The term “ides” may derive from an ancient Etruscan word meaning “divide,” as in “dividing” the month roughly in half. When the Western world’s monthly calendar diverged from the lunar calendar, and the full moon consequently wasn’t always on the 13th or the 15th, the term “ides” faded from use. It’s probably Shakespeare we have to thank for the familiarity of “the Ides of March” today: “Beware the Ides of March” is a soothsayer’s warning to the title character in the bard’s play, “Julius Caesar.”

March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, celebrating Ireland’s patron saint. Here’s SALT’s “Brief Theology of St. Patrick’s Day.”

March 17 is also the day in 1901 that Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings were first shown at a major exhibition — eleven years after the artist’s death (he sold only one of his paintings during his lifetime). The exhibition was a sensation, and helped open the way for galleries to show other unconventional artists, such as Henri Matisse, in the years that followed.

Before devoting himself full-time to painting, Van Gogh’s dream was to become a pastor and preacher — and he conceived his painting as another form of proclaiming the Gospel. He said, “To me, to believe in God is to feel that there is a God, not dead or stuffed, but alive, urging us toward love with irresistible force.”

March 20 is the beginning of the first day of spring this year, when the vernal equinox occurs in the Northern Hemisphere. As the Earth orbits the sun, sometimes its axis is tilted toward the sun (summer in the Northern Hemisphere) and sometimes away from it (winter). Today, it’s neither; the North Pole and the South Pole are equidistant from the sun. The term “equinox” is from the Latin for “equal” (aequus) and “night” (nox), the idea being that today, night and day are as close to equal in length as they will be all year.

Of spring, Emily Dickinson wrote:

A little Madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown —
Who ponders this tremendous scene — 
This whole Experiment of Green —
As if it were his own!

March 20 is also the day in 1852 that Harriet Beecher Stowe published her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The daughter of Lyman Beecher, a well known Congregationalist minister, Stowe’s ministry would take a literary form: Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a national sensation. One of the bestselling novels of all time, the novel was for many an eye-opening, unsparing, tragic depiction of the evils of slavery, and a vision that helped galvanize the abolitionist movement.

March 20 is also the birthday of legendary children’s television host Fred Rogers, born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in 1928. After graduating with a divinity degree from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962, he was ordained by the Presbyterian Church. The following year, he appeared on camera for the first time on the show that would evolve into Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood — which debuted nationally in 1968. It went on to become PBS’s longest-running show ever, taping its final episode in 2000.  

Here’s a lovely gift from Rogers: “One Silent Minute.”