Theologian's Almanac for Week of October 15, 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, October 15:

October 15 is the feast day of St. Teresa of Ávila, the widely influential Spanish monastic, author, mystic, and founder of a new Carmelite order in 1562. Her spiritual autobiography, The Way of Perfection, is a classic, as is her meditation on the contemplative life, The Interior Castle. In 1970 she was the first woman to be honored as a Doctor of the Church.

Here’s a taste of her imagination: She describes the stages of prayer in terms of bringing water into a garden of the soul, so the garden might grow. The first stage, she says, is like pulling a bucket of water directly up out of a well by strenuous effort; the second stage goes more easily, with God’s help, as if drawing the bucket up by means of a pulley; the third stage is virtually effortless, as if God is irrigating the garden; and the fourth stage, the stage of ecstasy, she describes as rain falling on the garden from above.

She wrote: “Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul.”

And again: “I do not fear Satan half so much as I fear those who fear him.”

October 16 is the birthday of the Irish novelist and playwright Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin in 1854. Though he was an adamant agnostic throughout his life, he nevertheless was a thoughtful admirer of Jesus: “He is just like a work of art,” Wilde wrote. “He does not really teach one anything, but by being brought into his presence one becomes something.”

October 18 is the feast day of Luke the Evangelist, author of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. Likely a highly-educated Gentile convert, Luke is considered the best Greek stylist among the four gospel writers, and because his descriptions of Jesus’ healings include correct medical terminology of his day, he is widely thought to have been a physician. Later traditions developed that he was also a painter, and several paintings, in Rome and elsewhere, are attributed to him. In any case, he’s remembered as an artist, both of language and of pigment, and he’s the patron saint of both physicians and painters.

October 21 is the birthday of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born in Devonshire, England, in 1772. As a young man, he gave lectures on religion, wrote journalism, and attempted to single-handedly create his own magazine — but eventually settled on poetry as his calling. He met the poet William Wordsworth in 1795, and their brief friendship gave rise to the most productive period in Coleridge’s life. The two poets enjoyed composing their work while walking, and they spent several days hiking the coast, passing the time by creating a gothic ballad about a tragic sea voyage — which Coleridge eventually developed into his most famous poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” It was published with Wordsworth in a collection entitled, Lyrical Ballads, today considered the founding document of the Romantic movement in poetry.

Here’s a taste of Coleridge:

“If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke — Ay! and what then?”

And again, from the "Rime”:

“He prayeth best, who loveth best;
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us;
He made and loveth all.”

October 21 is also the date Martin Luther joined the faculty of the University of Wittenberg in 1512. After a frustrating period in a monastery and a disillusioning visit to a church conference in Rome, he decided to pursue a doctorate at Wittenberg — and did so well that he was asked to join the faculty. Preparing lessons for his students gave him an occasion to work out his thoughts about the monastery and his trip to Rome, and his thinking crystallized when, in 1517, Pope Leo X announced the sale of indulgences — monetary gifts to the church said to lessen the donor’s ultimate punishment for his or her sins — to help finance the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica. Outraged, Luther wrote a treatise called “Disputation on the Power of Indulgences” — commonly known today as “The Ninety-five Theses” — arguing against the sale of indulgences as both corrupt and theologically mistaken. The (probably apocryphal) story goes that he nailed his theses to the door of the university chapel; in any case, his ideas circulated swiftly and widely, stirring controversy and helping to spark what later became known as the Protestant reformations in Western Europe.