Theologian's Almanac for Week of March 8, 2020
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 8:
March 8 is the day in 1855 that a train first crossed the first railway suspension bridge at Niagara Falls, New York - which raises the question: How exactly do you build a suspension bridge across a 800-foot gorge, 250 feet above the rushing water below?
The answer begins with a kite. An engineer named Charles Ellet Jr. announced a prize of $5 for any child who managed to fly a kite across the gorge from the Canadian side to the American side, such that the kite string could be tied down on both sides. After a few days and many attempts, one enterprising boy managed the feat - and Ellet’s team then tied a slightly heavier line to one end of the kite string and, by means of the kite string, pulled the line across the gap. They then repeated the process with still heavier lines, then ropes, then light metal cables, then heavy metal cables - until there were lines across the gap strong enough to support a railway suspension bridge, and eventually to support an entire train. All of which goes to show: the power of a kite!
March 9 is the beginning of Purim, the Jewish holiday celebrating the saving of the Jewish people from the plot to exterminate them attempted by the Achaemenid Persian Empire official, Haman, as narrated in the Book of Esther. The story is full of surprises and reversals - and its celebration is marked by festive feasting, philanthropy, gifts, masks, and public recitation of the Esther story.
March 10 is the day Harriet Tubman died in 1913. Her birth year is uncertain, but it was likely about 1820. As a 15-year-old, after refusing to help an enslaver restrain a runaway, Harriet was struck in the head, knocked unconscious, and left for days. After her recovery, she suffered from seizures, dizziness, and hypersomnia - and at the same time began to have prophetic visions and dreams, which she interpreted as communication from God.
In 1849, she escaped from enslavement in Maryland and made her way to Philadelphia. She then returned repeatedly to rescue members of her family and dozens of others, one small group at a time, traveling by night from safehouse to safehouse along the Underground Railroad. After the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, she helped guide people even farther north into Canada. She became known as “Moses,” and is said to have accompanied hundreds of people from enslavement to freedom.
She also served in the Civil War as a scout and spy. After the war, she began taking in orphans, the infirm, and the elderly. She bought land near her home in 1903 and opened the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged and Indigent - where she herself died ten years later.
Frederick Douglass wrote to her in 1868: “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day - you in the night... The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism.”
March 10 is also the day in 1959 that 300,000 Tibetans surrounded the Dalai Lama’s palace, both to protest China’s occupation and to protect the Dalai Lama, whom they feared the Chinese military was about to abduct. A short time later, after the Dalai Lama was evacuated to India, tens of thousands of Tibetans were killed by Chinese troops. Many survivors followed the Dalai Lama to India, where he governs in exile from a location in the Himalayan mountains.
March 11 is the day in 1918 that the initial cases emerged of what would become the worst pandemic in world history, the influenza pandemic of 1918. More than 20% of the world’s population eventually became infected, and more than 50 million people died in just a few months, approximately 500,000 in the U.S. alone. To put that in perspective, 16 million people lost their lives in World War I.
March 11 is also the day in 1818 that the novel Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus was first published. Initially, it was published anonymously - but after it became a sensation, 21-year-old Mary Shelley announced that she was its author. Many didn’t believe that such a young woman could have written such a compelling, sophisticated story of creation, philosophy, ethics, and cultural criticism: the tale of scientist Victor Frankenstein and the creature he constructs out of spare parts from corpses. Now considered a classic, Frankenstein inaugurated the genre of science fiction, and in the 1960s, became an icon of feminist literature.
March 13 is the day in 1781 that English astronomer Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus. Others had noticed the celestial body before, but it was Herschel who figured out it was a planet - then the farthest known planet in the solar system. The blue-green ice giant is named after the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos, and its 27 moons are named after characters from Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Uranus’ axis is tilted so far over that, relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun, the planet is lying and spinning “on its side,” so to speak, with its rings circling it vertically.
March 14 is the birthday of Albert Einstein, born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879. As a young boy, he was fascinated with how a compass needle responds to unseen forces - and while he remained curious and thoughtful throughout his youth, his grades in school were unremarkable. When he graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, he was the only one in his graduating class who wasn’t offered a teaching job - and he then spent two years unsuccessfully looking for one. In the end, he gave up and took a job as a technical assistant at the Swiss patent office.
As it turned out, however, the job was perfect. Not only did it afford him a good deal of free time to work on physics, it also exercised his mind as he examined and evaluated new inventions: “Working on the final formulation of technological patents was a veritable blessing for me,” he said. “It enforced many-sided thinking and also provided important stimuli to physical thought.” Through this work, Einstein was exposed to a constant stream of mechanical, practical, and entrepreneurial thinking about electric light, clocks, electromagnetism, and more. He later called the patent office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”
And during his two-year job search, Einstein took out an ad offering his services as a physics tutor - and that led to meeting Maurice Solovine, a Romanian philosophy student. The two hit it off immediately, ditched the tutor-student arrangement in favor of friendship, and formed a small discussion group they dubbed the “Olympia Academy,” gathering regularly in Einstein’s apartment, eating sausages, cheese, and fruit while debating the biggest ideas of the day.
With these various influences swirling and interacting in his mind - the practical insights from the patent office work and the philosophical insights from the Olympia Academy discussions - Einstein reflected on various “thought experiments” in theoretical physics at his clerk’s desk. In the year 1905, while still a patent clerk, he changed the field of physics four times with four groundbreaking papers on a particle theory of light, on molecules in liquid, and on “special relativity,” including the equation that made him famous: E = mc². E is energy, m is mass, and c stands for what Einstein argued is the universe’s constant: the velocity of light.
Albert Einstein, the quiet child and poor university student who couldn’t find a teaching job, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921. He once said, “The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.”
He also said: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.”