Theologian's Almanac for Week of March 7, 2021
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 7:
March 7 is the anniversary of the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965, the day known as “Bloody Sunday.” Six hundred marchers — including the late, great John Lewis — departed from Selma, bound for the state capitol to demonstrate African-American voting rights. They got all of six blocks before state and local law enforcement blocked them, ordered them to disperse, and then attacked them with tear gas and billy clubs. ABC News interrupted their regular programming to show footage of the violence, and the dramatic images helped shift public opinion. Demonstrations appeared across the country, and two weeks later, another march from Selma made it all the way to Montgomery, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By the time they reached the capitol, their numbers had swelled to over 25,000.
March 8 is the day in 1855 that a train first crossed the very first railway suspension bridge, an event that took place in 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 string to one end of the kite string and, by means of the kite string, pulled the heavier string 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 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.”
The Biden reportedly is working to speed up the process that eventually will result in Tubman’s image on the United States $20 bill.
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 the Israʾ and Miʿraj, one of the most celebrated dates on the Islamic calendar, commemorating the two parts of a night journey the prophet Muhammed, it is said, took one night in 621. The first part of the journey was to “the farthest mosque,” a voyage from Mecca to Jerusalem. The second part was an ascent to heaven (“Miʿraj” means “ladder”).
March 11 is also 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.