Theologian's Almanac for Week of April 3, 2022
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 3:
April 3 is the birthday of British primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, born in London, England, in 1934. Goodall revolutionized the study of the social lives of chimpanzees by living among them for years. She’s a household name today (check out her current work here) — but imagine her in 1960, a 26-year-old unknown with no formal scientific education, alone and armed with only a notebook and binoculars, embedding herself with wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She initially spent months establishing herself as a non-threatening presence, eventually working her way up into what she dubbed “the banana club” by sharing food with her subjects. She mirrored their behaviors as much as she could, climbing trees, mimicking gestures, and sampling food.
She was the first to discover that chimpanzees make and use tools, as well as eat meat (they were previously thought to be vegetarian). Breakthroughs like these led to her becoming one of the only people in the history of Cambridge University to be awarded a PhD degree without first earning a baccalaureate degree.
She said, “I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.”
April 3 is also the beginning of Ramadan this year, the Muslim month of fasting, prayer, reflection, and community building. Commemorating God’s revelation of the Quran to Muhammed, the month lasts from cresent moon to cresent moon.
April 3 is also the day in 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last public address, now known as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. King had come to Memphis in support of a sanitation workers’ strike, and was not scheduled to speak — but the workers clamored to hear from him, and so, though he was exhausted and under the weather, he came to Bishop Charles Mason Temple that evening to say a few words.
Speaking without notes, he said, “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”
He spoke of death frequently in the speech, recalling an episode a decade earlier when he was stabbed at a book signing, as well as the many death threats he’d received over the years. Even the flight he’d just taken, from Atlanta to Memphis, was delayed for an hour because of a bomb threat.
He ended this way: “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
As he finished, he nearly collapsed — and had to be assisted back into his seat. Tears were streaming down his face.
He was killed the next day, April 4, 1968, at the age of 39.
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, on her 40th birthday, he, too, was killed. 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 a single 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.”
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A special SALT “thank you” to Anna Hermsdorf for this beautiful linocut illustration of Jane Goodall!