Theologian's Almanac for Week of February 26, 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, February 26:
February 26 is the day in 1919 that President Woodrow Wilson established Grand Canyon National Park, after three decades of organized opposition from miners, ranchers, other businesspeople. The park now receives some 5 million visitors every year.
The canyon itself is 277 river miles long, 10 miles wide, and about a mile deep. Upon seeing it for the first time, Theodore Roosevelt remarked: “The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison — beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world... Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimit, and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
At the same time, the formation of the park also involved the dispossession and access restriction of Native American people. The two most numerous tribes that reside near the Grand Canyon today are the Havasupai and the Hualapai. The canyon is also understood as the place of emergence for the Navajo, Hopi, Paiute and Zuni. The canyon has been inhabited by human beings for at least 10,000 years.
March 1 is the birthday of the American writer Ralph Ellison, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1914. The grandson of enslaved people, Ellison originally dreamed of being a classical composer — but the renowned African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright persuaded him to become a writer. One day, recovering from an illness on a friend’s farm in Vermont, Ellison found himself sitting in a barn with a typewriter, staring at an empty page — and then a sentence came to him: “I am an invisible man.” He spent the next seven years exploring that idea, and in particular, how racism can make a person “invisible.” Invisible Man was published in 1952, and today is regarded as a classic of twentieth century literature.
March 1 is also St. David’s Day, a national holiday in Wales (where St. David is the patron saint). All over Wales today, school-aged children are competing in (in person or online) music competitions and poetry recitations, all performed entirely in the Welsh language. The tradition is over a thousand years old, and it’s known as “eisteddfod,” a word from the Welsh “to sit” and “to be.”