Theologian's Almanac for Week of November 19, 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 19:
November 20 is the birthday of astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble, born in Marshfield, Missouri, in 1889. His father encouraged him to become a lawyer, but he fell in love with astronomy, and left legal practice after a year in the field. After World War I, he joined the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. His specialty was nebulae, and in 1923 (just a hundred years ago!) he discovered that the “Andromeda Nebula” wasn’t a nebula at all, but rather another galaxy entirely — a stunning breakthrough, since at the time astronomers believed our own Milky Way galaxy to be the only one in the universe. Hubble discovered more than 20 other galaxies over the course of his career, and noticed that virtually all them are moving away from the Milky Way; his data eventually demonstrated that the universe as a whole is expanding, lending observational support to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. As Stephen Hawking later put it, Hubble’s discovery was “one of the great intellectual revolutions of the 20th century.”
The Hubble Space Telescope, named in his honor, was launched in 1990; it has since transformed our understanding of the cosmos. One of the most astonishing images in human history is the 1995 Hubble Deep Field (and the Ultra Deep Field that followed), which showed that there are no less than hundreds of billions of galaxies — the best estimate today is around two trillion! — in the visible universe. Think of it: in just a century, our understanding of creation’s scale has gone from one galaxy to trillions!
November 21 is the day the Mayflower Compact was signed in 1620 (November 11 in the Old Style calendar). The Mayflower had originally set sail from Plymouth, England, bound for the colony of Virginia — but fierce storms blew them off course, and they arrived instead off Cape Cod. Of approximately 100 people on board, about half were religious separatists (known as “Saints” or, later, “Puritans”) who had split from the Church of England. Since they’d missed Virginia entirely, the leaders on board thought it wise — not least because of simmering tensions between the Puritan separatists and the ship’s other passengers — to draw up a provisional system of government while they waited for a new royal charter to arrive. With the ship anchored in Provincetown Harbor, a 200-word document was drafted, based loosely on a Puritan church covenant. Each adult male had to sign the compact before they were allowed to come ashore. It was the first endeavor by European immigrants to form a democratic government in what would become the United States.
As often is the case in United States history, this anniversary calls us to a complex kind of remembering: the momentous feat of European immigration and an important step forward in democratic government — and at the same time, a beginning of the colonial injustice toward native people in this part of the world, a devastating history that includes the Nauset tribe of the Wampanoag Nation, whom the passengers on the Mayflower first encountered. Far from remembering only one dimension of this story and erasing the others, what’s required is the ability to take up and learn from multiple perspectives at once. This week provides a distinctive opportunity to do just that, since it includes not only the Mayflower anniversary, but also Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Day (see below). And with all this in mind, here’s recent U.S. Poet Laureate (and Muscogee (Creek) performer and writer) Joy Harjo’s “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings.”
November 22 is the feast day of St. Cecilia. The story goes that, in the early third century CE, Cecilia sang to God as she died a martyr’s death — and in later years, she became the patron saint of musicians, and of music. In the sixteenth century, a large music festival to honor St. Cecilia developed in Normandy, and the custom spread to England in the next century. Both Handel and Purcell composed odes to honor her, the painter Raphael created a piece entitled, “The Ecstasy of St. Cecilia,” and Chaucer wrote of her in his Second Nonnes Tale. Today, in paintings and stained glass, St. Cecilia is typically depicted sitting at an organ.
November 23 is Thanksgiving Day. Here’s SALT’s “Brief Theology of Thanksgiving.”
November 24 is Native American Heritage Day this year, established by Congress (and signed by President Obama) in 2009. You can read the joint resolution here. In short, the day is to be set aside for honoring and celebrating Native American history and culture, yesterday and today, through education, reflection, and cultural events.
November 24 is also the birthday of the philosopher Benedict Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632. A descendent of Portuguese Jews, Spinoza studied Hebrew Scripture, the Talmud, and Kabbalah’s traditions of mysticism and miracle. He argued that everything in the universe was made from the same divine substance, and so that God and the laws of nature were one and the same. His contemporaries viewed him as both a heretic and an atheist, but a century after his death, a host of influential thinkers — Goethe, Lessing, Hegel, and others — praised him as “intoxicated with the divine.”
Spinoza once said, “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” And again: “If you want the future to be different from the present, study the past.”
November 25 is the birthday of Pope Saint John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in Lombardi, Italy, in 1881. Already advanced in age when he was elected (he was 76 years old), few thought his papacy would be revolutionary — but he quickly developed a reputation as one of the most compassionate and innovative of popes. He was the first since 1870 to make local pastoral visits, including to a prison to visit inmates and a hospital to visit children afflicted with polio. He famously said, “We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.”
Today he is best known for calling the Second Vatican Council in 1962, resulting in major church reform for the first time in centuries: celebrating the Mass in local languages, for example, and opening up respectful, appreciative relations with other religions.
November 25 is also the birthday of American physician and writer Lewis Thomas, born in New York City in 1913. His essay collection on the wonders of biology, The Lives of a Cell, won the National Book Award. Like a modern-day psalmist, Thomas wrote: “The recorded songs of the humpback whale, filled with tensions and resolutions, ambiguities and allusions, incomplete, can be listened to as a part of music, like an isolated section of an orchestra. If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic timpani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.”
November 26 is the birthday of American writer Marilynne Robinson, born in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1943. Robinson is most famous for her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, Gilead, written in the form of letters from an elderly, ailing pastor to his young son.
Here’s a taste: "Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain. At times like that I might not care particularly whether people are listening to whatever I have to say, because I know where their thoughts are."
Robinson said: "I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, but merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us."
And again: “At this point, right across the traditions, there is nothing more valuable to be done than to make people understand that religion is beautiful and it is large.”