Theologian's Almanac for Week of September 10, 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, September 10:
September 10 is the birthday of poet Mary Oliver, born in Maple Heights, Ohio, in 1935, where she endured a troubled childhood (“It was a very dark and broken house that I came from. And I escaped it, barely. With years of trouble.”). Partly to retreat from her home life, she would often skip school and spend time in the woods, reading and rereading the likes of Keats and Dickinson and Whitman (“I got saved by poetry. And by the beauty of the world.”).
After dropping out of college, one day she made a pilgrimage to Steepletop in Austerlitz, New York, the historic home of the famous poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay. Mary hit it off with Millay’s sister, Norma, and ended up staying at Steepletop for seven years, helping Norma organize Millay’s papers and working on her own poems. It was there she also met the photographer Molly Malone Cook, who came to visit Norma; Mary and Molly fell in love, eventually moving together to Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1984, Oliver won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection, American Primitive.
She wrote much of her work while walking or hiking in the woods, with a hand sewn notebook and pencil in her pocket. She once lost a pencil on such a walk, and subsequently began hiding pencils in the trees along the trails, so she could always find a spare.
She said: “I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours... If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there's no reason why they can't get up at 4:30 or five and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did.”
And again: “It has frequently been remarked about my own writings that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer.”
One of Oliver’s most beloved poems, “The Summer Day,” ends with the line, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” An interviewer once asked her what she’d done with hers, and she replied, with a twinkle in her eye: “Used a lot of pencils.”
September 14 is the day George Frideric Handel completed the Messiah oratorio in 1741. He wrote virtually nonstop, morning and night, completing the score in just 24 days. It was originally written for the Easter season, but eventually became associated with Christmastime. Even Mozart, when he supervised a new arrangement in 1789, was reluctant to change a thing: “Handel knows better than any of us what will make an effect,” Mozart declared. “When he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt!”
September 15 is the day in 1963 that a bomb went off in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. One of the most segregated cities in the country, Birmingham was a key battleground in the Civil Rights Movement, and the church was a common meeting place for movement leaders. Four schoolgirls — Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Denise McNair — were killed in the terrorist blast, and more than 20 other church members were injured. The press reports were vivid: “Dozens of survivors, their faces dripping blood from the glass that flew out of the church’s stained glass windows, staggered around the building in a cloud of white dust raised by the explosion. The blast crushed two nearby cars like toys and blew out windows blocks away... Parts of brightly painted children’s furniture were strewn about in one Sunday school room, and blood stained the floors.”
A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Chambliss, was convicted of dynamite possession without a permit, and so was sentenced to a $100 fine and six months in jail — but was found not guilty in the murders of the four girls. A subsequent investigation revealed that the FBI, at J. Edgar Hoover’s direction, had suppressed key evidence against Chambliss. He was retried in 1973, found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison. Two of his accomplices were tried and convicted in 2001 and 2002.
September 15 is also the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States; the month runs from September 15 to October 15. Its predecessor, Hispanic Heritage Week, was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, having been originally proposed by Rep. Edward R. Roybal of Los Angeles, California. September 15 was chosen as the date to begin because it’s the eve of “The Cry of Delores” (also known as “El Grito de Independencia,” The Cry of Independence), the day in 1810 when Roman Catholic priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla rang his church bell in Delores, Mexico, beginning the Mexican War of Independence from Spain. Today, Mexico, most Central American countries, and Chile all commemorate their independence from Spain on September 15 or shortly thereafter.
September 15 (at sunset) also begins Rosh Hashanah this year, the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah (literally “head of the year”) is a two-day celebration, often including the sounding of a shofar (a ram’s horn) and eating apples dipped in honey, to usher in a sweet new year — year 5784 on this ancient calendar, to be exact!