Theologian's Almanac for Week of November 5, 2023
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, November 5:
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 inflected 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, and Anne agreed. 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 her classic, “Music.” And here’s that original collection’s title poem, 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.
November 8 is the birthday of American activist and writer Dorothy Day, born in 1897. After a time as a radical journalist and activist in New York City, she converted to Catholicism and, along with the French Catholic activist Peter Maurin, began a publication called The Catholic Worker devoted to issues of justice, poverty, and human rights. The first issue, in 1933, cost one penny — and it still does today. In that inaugural edition, Day wrote that the paper was “For those who are sitting on park benches in the warm spring sunlight. For those who are huddling in shelters trying to escape the rain. For those who are walking the streets in the all but futile search for work.” The discussions provoked by The Catholic Worker led to the creation of “houses of hospitality” in New York City and across the country, where people without homes, especially women, could seek shelter, companionship, and assistance.
About her life’s work, Dorothy Day said: “What we would like to do is change the world — make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. And, by fighting for better conditions, by crying out unceasingly for the rights of the workers, the poor, of the destitute — the rights of the ‘worthy’ and the ‘unworthy’ poor, in other words — we can, to a certain extent, change the world; we can work for the oasis, the little cell of joy and peace in a harried world. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever-widening circle will reach around the world. We repeat, there is nothing we can do but love, and, dear God, please enlarge our hearts to love each other, to love our neighbor, to love our enemy as our friend.”
Her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, published in 1952, is a modern classic. She said, “My strength returns to me with my cup of coffee and the reading of the Psalms.”
November 8 is also the day that Mount Holyoke Female Seminary was founded in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1837. In those days, though there were 120 men’s colleges in America, there were no equivalents for women. Mary Lyon, a teacher and chemist, thought that ought to change. She wrote to a friend, “It is desirable that the plans relating to the subject should not seem to originate with us but with benevolent gentlemen. If the object should excite attention, there is danger that many good men will fear the effect on society of so much female influence, and what they will call female greatness.” But the men she hired to fundraise couldn’t get the job done — so Lyon did it herself, raising $27,000 from 1,800 donors in churches, farms, sewing circles and other gatherings. Mount Holyoke’s inaugural class was 80 young women, some having travelled for days to reach South Hadley. Each brought a Bible, an atlas, a dictionary, and two spoons.
November 9 is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass” in 1938, when German Nazis provoked, coordinated, and permitted assaults on Jewish synagogues, homes, and businesses. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels used the murder of a German diplomat by a Polish Jew as a pretext for the attacks, intentionally arranging them to look like spontaneous demonstrations. They ordered the police to allow the violence, and firefighters to put out fires only if they spread to adjacent, non-Jewish properties. Whether out of fear or bigotry, virtually everyone cooperated. It was the first mass incarceration of Jews in Nazi Germany; many consider Kristallnacht to be the beginning of the Holocaust.
November 9 is also the birthday of Anne Sexton, one of the most popular American poets of the mid-twentieth century, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967. Her poems often blended sacred and profane dimensions of life (here’s her poem, “Welcome Morning”), and she frequently explored the contours and restrictions of gender. On that latter topic, here’s “Her Kind,” an unsettling, haunting short film in tribute to one of her most well-known poems, reflecting on how gender roles can act like straitjackets (Sexton herself reads the poem in the film).
November 10 is the day “Sesame Street” first aired, in 1969 on PBS. In those days, every week the average American preschooler watched 27 hours of television, much of it violent and created for adults. Joan Ganz Cooney, a documentary producer for PBS, envisioned a free, fun, educational television show for children — and especially for disadvantaged children — to help prepare them for kindergarten. Sesame Street was an immediate hit, but early tests showed that while preschoolers liked the human actors well enough, they were positively mesmerized by the show’s motley crew of puppets — called “Muppets” — created by a young visionary puppeteer, Jim Henson. And so began the world’s love affair with Kermit the Frog, Big Bird, Grover, and the rest of the Muppet universe. By 1979, 9 million preschoolers were watching Sesame Street every day.
November 10 is also the birthday of theologian and reformer Martin Luther, born in 1483 in what is now Germany. His parents hoped he’d become a lawyer, but during his legal studies — so the story goes — he was out riding on horseback and got caught in a raging thunderstorm, feared for his life, and bargained for survival: “Help, Saint Anna! I will become a monk!” This kind of passionate extremity would recur throughout his life. As a monk, he became profoundly preoccupied — even obsessed — with his personal salvation, strenuously trying to reshape his character, purify his heart, and prove his worth through such trials as self-flagellation and lying down all night in the snow.
After a trip to Rome, he became disillusioned with Christian corruption, and in particular with the selling of “indulgences,” payments to the Church that would, it was said, guarantee divine forgiveness. Luther found the practice outrageous, and he wrote a treatise condemning it, later known as the “95 Theses.” His close reading of scripture had led him to radically revise his former views: salvation, he argued, doesn’t come through our efforts “works” at all (much less through lying all night in the snow, or purchasing forgiveness!), but rather through the divine gift of sincere faith. For Luther, a person’s inner disposition is what really matters — that much he carried forward from his monastic days — and salvation turns on the divine gift of faith or trust in God, not on human acts of supposed “holiness” that earn or buy or otherwise acquire God’s saving grace.
Luther wasn’t the first critic of church corruption, nor was he the first to contend that faith is at the center of Christian life. But he was a passionate, charismatic, uncompromising figure, both profoundly gifted and profoundly flawed (in his later years, for example, he sometimes turned to repugnant, anti-Jewish tropes — yet another case study of how the Church must confess and remain vigilant against Christian anti-Judaism). At his best, Luther wrote in a fiercely intelligent, creative, sometimes profane style; he had boundless energy (for example, he single-handedly translated the entire Bible into German, influencing Christianity and German culture for generations to come); and most important of all, his notoriety coincided with two other phenomena: first, the rise of the printing press, which spread his ideas like wildfire; and second, a burgeoning resentment, among nobles and peasants alike, of Church power and corruption.
Luther wanted to reform the Church, not split from it — but the Church was not amused by the upstart monk from Wittenburg, other voices across Europe began to chime in, and the Protestant Reformations were born.
November 11 is Veterans’ Day (this year’s Federal holiday will be observed on Friday, November 10). Here’s SALT’s “Brief Theology of Veterans Day.” Check it out — we promise, you’ll never think about the day the same way again!
November 11 is also the birthday of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, born in Moscow in 1821. After some initial success as a writer, he fell in with a group of utopian socialists, and was arrested and sentenced to death. After eight months of solitary confinement, he was marched before a firing squad to be shot — but as he stood waiting to die, he learned that his sentence had been commuted to exile in Siberia. He spent eight years there, four of them in hard labor. He returned with a renewed commitment to writing — and a new, provocative set of religious ideas. “The Grand Inquisitor,” a scene embedded within his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, is a theological masterpiece: Christ returns, is promptly arrested by the Church as a heretic, and is brought before the Grand Inquisitor for a fascinating — and devastating — interrogation.