Theologian's Almanac for Week of July 25, 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, July 25:

July 28 is the birthday of the British poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, born in Stratford, near London, in 1844. His whole family — nine children in all — were avid artists; Hopkins loved to draw and paint, and also to climb trees and walk barefoot in the grass. A star student who won prizes for his poetry, he attended Oxford to study classics, and had a religious conversion along the way, eventually deciding to become a Jesuit priest. For seven years he wrote no poetry — and then, after a German passenger ship sank in a catastrophic storm, killing all aboard (including some Franciscan nuns), he wrote a long poem in commemoration: “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”

This project convinced him that poetry could help him express his faith, and he took up the pen again: in 1877, the year he was ordained, he wrote most of the poems for which he is known today, including “Spring,” “The Windhover,” and “God’s Grandeur.” During his short life (he died of typhoid fever in 1889, at the age of 44), he published only a handful of minor poems. But he had shared much of his work in correspondence with his close friend, Robert Bridges — and when Bridges became poet laureate of England, he edited and published the first book of Hopkins’ poems in 1918, nearly thirty years after his death. Hopkins is now one of the most beloved Christian poets in the English-speaking world.

Here’s his classic, “God’s Grandeur,” along with a counterpoint poem from U.S. poet laureate, Kay Ryan, “Blandeur.”

July 29 is the feast day of Martha, sister of Mary of Bethany and Lazarus (on another calendar, it’s also the feast day of all three together: Mary, Martha, and Lazarus). Martha is the patron saint of homemakers, often depicted with keys and a broom. In the famous story in Luke 10, Martha is unfavorably contrasted with Mary, who sits listening at Jesus’ feet while Martha is busy hosting the gathering. But today’s feast day lifts up Martha and the importance of hospitality, as well as the legend that Martha went on to become an effective (and no doubt well organized!) evangelist to Marseille, the oldest city in France.

So raise a glass to Martha — and wash it well! :)

July 29 is also the birthday of the American poet Stanley Kunitz, born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1905, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He worked as a reporter, farmer, and professor, publishing poems occasionally. In his mid-50’s, he was so little-known that his Selected Poems (1958) was rejected by no less than eight publishers — and then, when it finally appeared in print, it won the Pulitzer Prize. (Poets of the world, take heart!) He was appointed U.S. poet laureate at the age of 95, and died at 100.

Kunitz said, “Live in the layers, / not on the litter.”

And here’s his classic poem, “Benediction”:

God banish from your house
The fly, the roach, the mouse

That riots in the walls
Until the plaster falls;

Admonish from your door
The hypocrite and liar;

No shy, soft, tigrish fear
Permit upon your stair,

Nor agents of your doubt.
God drive them whistling out.

Let nothing touched with evil,
Let nothing that can shrivel

Heart's tenderest frond, intrude
Upon your still, deep blood.

Against the drip of night
God keep all windows tight,

Protect your mirrors from
Surprise, delirium,

Admit no trailing wind
Into your shuttered mind

To plume the lake of sleep
With dreams. If you must weep

God give you tears, but leave
You secrecy to grieve,

And islands for your pride,
And love to nest in your side.

+ Stanley Kunitz