Theologian's Almanac for Week of January 28, 2024
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, January 28:
January 31 is the birthday of Thomas Merton, born in Prades, France, in 1915. While a student at Columbia University, he decided to write his master’s thesis on William Blake, and found himself deeply influenced by him. After a few more years of study, he converted to Christianity, and in 1941 entered a Trappist abbey in Kentucky, where he lived for most of his life. He wrote in his diary: “Going to the Trappists is exciting. I return to the idea again and again: ‘Give up everything, give up everything!’” His superior at the monastery noticed his talent for writing, and encouraged him to pursue it; Merton wrote more than 70 books over the course of his lifetime, along with 2,000 poems and many essays and lectures. Many of his books combine theology, politics, and interreligious dialogue, and he’s perhaps best known today for his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, which ends with the line: Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi (“Here ends the book, but not the searching”).
February 1 begins Black History Month in the United States and Canada. Ireland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom celebrate it in October.
February 1 is also the birthday of American writer Langston Hughes, born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. Growing up in Lawrence, Kansas, the public library was one of the only integrated public buildings in the city, and Hughes spent as much time there as possible. As he later put it, “Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas.”
In 1926, at the age of 24, Hughes published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, and a widely-read essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a spirited defense of African-American arts and culture. He wrote: “Then there are the low-down folks, the so-called common element, and they are the majority — may the Lord be praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not particularly care whether they are like white folks or anybody else. Their joy runs, bang! into ecstasy. Their religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest a little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let's dance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, as for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, and jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of colorful, distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of American standardization. And perhaps these common people will give to the world its truly great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself.”
Langston Hughes went on to write 16 books of poetry, more than 20 plays, 10 collections of short stories, not to mention essays, novels, children's books, song lyrics, and radio scripts. At times he was a blistering critic of how religion, and Christianity in particular, could be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
He became one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. The subject matter of his life’s writing, as he once put it, is the people he grew up with: “Workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago — people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter — and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.”
February 1 is also the birthday of the Liberian peace activist Leymah Roberta Gbowee, born in 1972. Gbowee’s work leading a women's nonviolent peace movement, Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, helped end the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Her efforts, along with those of her partner in peacemaking, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, opened the door to a time of stability, trust, and a free election in 2005 (which Sirleaf won). In 2011, Gbowee, Sirleaf, and Tawakkul Karman were awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
February 1 is also the feast day of St. Brigid, who died in Ireland around 525. She founded the co-ed monastery of Kildare, meaning “Church of the Oak.” Her name means “the exalted one,” and she was well known for her down-to-earth hospitality: hosting unexpected guests, the story goes, she once turned her bath water into beer. Now considered Ireland’s second patron saint (the other being Patrick, of course), she’s also patron of poets, scholars, blacksmiths, and healers.
February 3 is the birthday of American author, painter, and illustrator Norman Rockwell, born in New York City in 1894. Rockwell painted more than 4,000 original works over the course of his career, including some of the most iconic theological images in American popular culture. Among these are “Saying Grace,” “Freedom of Worship,” and “Golden Rule.” In the early 1960s, Rockwell had something of a conversion with regard to racism and social justice in the United States, and the result was the classic, “The Problem We All Live With,” inspired by the courage of Ruby Bridges.