Theologian's Almanac for Week of November 17, 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, November 17:
November 18 is the birthday of Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood, born in Ottawa, Ontario, in 1939. Because her father was an entomologist, while she was growing up, her family lived for extended periods in insect-research stations in the northern Canadian wilderness. Atwood is most famous today as a novelist, and in particular as the author of The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) — but she began as a poet. For a taste of her poetry, here’s her classic, “I Was Reading a Scientific Article.”
Atwood once said: “Men often ask me, ‘Why are your female characters so paranoid?’ It’s not paranoia. It’s recognition of their situation.”
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 important, 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 estimates today are in the trillions! — 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 (and all 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 time of year provides a distinctive opportunity to do just that, since it includes not only the Mayflower anniversary, but also Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Day next week. 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.
Looking ahead, here’s SALT’s “Brief Theology of Thanksgiving.”