Theologian's Almanac for Week of March 31, 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, March 31:
March 31 is Easter Sunday, celebrating the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It’s one of the few “moveable feasts” in the Christian calendar, floating to a different Sunday each year. Why? Jesus was said to have risen on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring — for Christians, a sign that the event’s significance is cosmic in scope, its anniversary depending more on the season and the moon than the numerical date on the calendar.
What’s the meaning of Easter today? For those who despair that death-dealing powers have the upper hand: fear not. Easter means God ultimately is and will be victorious over the powers of death. For those who despair with feelings of isolation and loneliness: fear not. Easter means we are all together in the risen Body of Christ, even if we’re separated in time or space. For those who despair that our guilt is too great for God to forgive: fear not. Easter means God has cleared all accounts, liberating humanity from shame, reconciling us to God and each other as God’s children.
For those who despair in the midst of pain and anguish: take heart. You are not alone: Jesus suffers with you in solidarity and companionship, and Easter means you will rise with him. For those who despair over a world filled with hate, violence, and scapegoating: be encouraged. In Christ’s passion, God has taken the place of the scapegoat in order to highlight and transform humanity’s violent ways — and Easter means God one day will overcome violence. Indeed, Easter means that God has taken one of the worst things in the world (the Roman cross) and remade it into one of the best (the Tree of Life), a sword into a ploughshare — and if the worst, then also the whole creation in the end! Like the cross, the empty tomb is a great divine mystery, a rising sun dispelling shadows in multiple directions. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
For more on Easter this year, check out SALT’s commentary here.
March 31 is also the birthday of poet and novelist Marge Piercy, born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936. In middle age, in her work and life she became newly intrigued by her Jewish roots, and especially by Reconstructionist Judaism: “The seasons are very vivid and real to us. Living seasonally is part of what I love about Judaism, as well as the tradition of social conscience, and the historical, religious, and spiritual aspects of Jewish holidays.”
April 1 is April Fools' Day, a day for benign foolishness, tricks, pranks, and other nonsense. In 1983, Professor Joseph Boskin, an historian at Boston University, explained that the practice dates back to the Roman Emperor Constantine, whose jesters challenged him that a fool could run the empire as well as he could. The emperor accepted the challenge and appointed a jester “king for a day” — and one the new king’s first actions was to decree an annual day of tomfoolery.
After interviewing Professor Boskin, the Associated Press published the story nationally — and only later realized that Boskin, true to the spirit of the day, had made the whole thing up!
April 3 is the birthday of British primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall, born in London, England, in 1934. Goodall revolutionized the study of the social lives of chimpanzees by living among them for years. She’s a household name today (check out her current work here) — but imagine her in 1960, a 26-year-old unknown with no formal scientific education, alone and armed with only a notebook and binoculars, embedding herself with wild chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She initially spent months establishing herself as a non-threatening presence, eventually working her way up into what she dubbed “the banana club” by sharing food with her subjects. She mirrored their behaviors as much as she could, climbing trees, mimicking gestures, and sampling food.
She was the first to discover that chimpanzees make and use tools, as well as eat meat (they were previously thought to be vegetarian). Breakthroughs like these led to her becoming one of the only people in the history of Cambridge University to be awarded a PhD degree without first earning a baccalaureate degree.
She said, “I don’t have any idea of who or what God is. But I do believe in some great spiritual power. I feel it particularly when I’m out in nature. It’s just something that’s bigger and stronger than what I am or what anybody is. I feel it. And it’s enough for me.”
April 3 is also the day in 1968 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his last public address, now known as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. King had come to Memphis in support of a sanitation workers’ strike, and was not scheduled to speak — but the workers clamored to hear from him, and so, though he was exhausted and under the weather, he came to Bishop Charles Mason Temple that evening to say a few words.
Speaking without notes, he said, “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”
He spoke of death frequently in the speech, recalling an episode a decade earlier when he was stabbed at a book signing, as well as the many death threats he’d received over the years. Even the flight he’d just taken, from Atlanta to Memphis, was delayed for an hour because of a bomb threat.
He ended this way: “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
As he finished, he nearly collapsed — and had to be assisted back into his seat. Tears were streaming down his face.
He was killed the next day, April 4, 1968, at the age of 39.
April 4 is also the birthday of American poet and writer Maya Angelou, born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1928. In 1965, working as a journalist in Ghana, she met with Malcolm X, and decided to return to the United States to help him establish his Organization of African-American Unity — but only a few days after she arrived, he was assassinated. A few years later, she agreed to work with Martin Luther King Jr. — but then, on her 40th birthday, he, too, was killed. Angelou fell into a depression.
Some friends recommended her to an editor at Random House, saying she should write an autobiography — but Angelou repeatedly refused. Then her friend, the writer James Baldwin, suggested a novel strategy to the editor: call her one more time, Baldwin said, and say you’re calling to tell her that you’ll stop bothering her, and that it’s probably just as well that she’s refused, because it’s terribly difficult to write an autobiography that’s also good literature. The plan worked like a charm: Angelou immediately agreed to take on the challenge.
On writing the book, she later said, “Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass — the slave narrative — speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we.” That first autobiography became I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). Angelou was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010.
Here’s wisdom from Angelou on being Christian.
April 4 is also the day in 1832 that Charles Darwin, traveling aboard the HMS Beagle, landed on the shores of Rio de Janeiro, in the midst of a five-year journey. Darwin had resolved to become a clergyman in the countryside, since many such clergy spent their weekdays as amateur naturalists — but before he completed his religious studies, he jumped at the opportunity to serve as chief naturalist on the HMS Beagle.
In a single day in Rio, he collected specimens from no less than 68 species of beetles. He also came across a parasitic wasp laying eggs inside a live caterpillar; the caterpillar was then eaten alive by the grubs when they hatched. This discovery shook Darwin’s belief in God. He wrote to a colleague: “There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the [parasitic wasp] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.”
On the other hand, however, when at last he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he described the world’s stunning, evolving biodiversity in theologically evocative terms: “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”