Theologian's Almanac for Week of February 25, 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, February 25:
February 26 is the day in 1919 that the United States established Grand Canyon National Park, after three decades of organized opposition from miners, ranchers, and other businesspeople. The park now receives some 5 million visitors every year.
The canyon itself is 277 river miles long, 10 miles wide, and about a mile deep. Upon seeing it for the first time, Theodore Roosevelt remarked: “The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison — beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world... Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimity, and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.”
At the same time, the formation of the park also involved the dispossession and access restriction of Native American people. The two most numerous tribes that reside near the Grand Canyon today are the Havasupai and the Hualapai. The canyon is also understood as the place of emergence by the Navajo, Hopi, Paiute and Zuni, and indeed, this wonder of the world has been inhabited by human beings for at least 10,000 years.
February 29 is Leap Day, a day inserted every four years to make up the nearly six hour difference between the common year (365 days) and the solar year (365 days + nearly six hours). If left unaddressed, this would mean the calendar would “fall behind” by about six hours a year, or 24 hours every four years — and so the every-four-year Leap Day helps us catch up and keep pace. By happy accident, Leap Years are the ones divisible by 4 (like 2024!).
Now, careful readers of that last paragraph will have noticed the annual discrepancy is “nearly” six hours each year: in fact, it’s about 11 minutes shy of six hours. This means that each Leap Day “overshoots” the target by 44 minutes, and so, little by little, the calendar gets a little ahead of itself. To account for this, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that Leap Day should be omitted when the year is divisible by 100, but not by 400. Thus we had a Leap Day in 2000, but we won’t in 2100. Mark your calendars!
March 1 is the birthday of the American writer Ralph Ellison, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1914. The grandson of enslaved people, Ellison originally dreamed of being a classical composer — but the renowned African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright persuaded him to become a writer. One day, recovering from an illness on a friend’s farm in Vermont, Ellison found himself sitting in a barn with a typewriter, staring at an empty page — and then a sentence came to him: “I am an invisible man.” He spent the next seven years exploring that idea, and in particular, how racism can make a person “invisible.” Invisible Man was published in 1952, and today is regarded as a classic of twentieth century literature.
March 1 is also St. David’s Day, a national holiday in Wales, where St. David is the patron saint. All over Wales today, school-aged children are competing (in person or online) in music competitions and poetry recitations, all performed entirely in the Welsh language. The tradition is over a thousand years old, and it’s known as “eisteddfod,” a word from the Welsh “to sit” and “to be.”