Theologian's Almanac for Week of November 24, 2019
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 24:
November 24 is the birthday of the philosopher Benedict Spinoza, born in Amsterdam in 1632. A descendent of Portuguese Jews, Spinoza studied Hebrew Scripture, the Talmud, and Kabbalah’s traditions of mysticism and miracle. He argued that everything in the universe was made from the same divine substance, and so that God and the laws of nature were one and the same. His contemporaries viewed him as both a heretic and an atheist, but a century after his death, a host of influential thinkers - Goethe, Lessing, Hegel, and others - praised him as “intoxicated with the divine.” Spinoza once said, “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.” And again: “If you want the future to be different from the present, study the past.”
November 25 is the birthday of Pope Saint John XXIII, born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli in Lombardi, Italy, in 1881. Already advanced in age when he was elected (he was 76 years old), few thought his papacy would be revolutionary - but he quickly developed a reputation as one of the most compassionate and innovative of popes. He was the first since 1870 to make local pastoral visits, including to a prison to visit inmates and a hospital to visit children afflicted with polio. He famously said, “We were all made in God’s image, and thus, we are all Godly alike.” Today he is best known for calling the Second Vatican Council in 1962, resulting in major church reform for the first time in centuries: celebrating the Mass in local languages, for example, and opening up respectful, appreciative relations with other religions.
November 25 is also the birthday of American physician and writer Lewis Thomas, born in New York City in 1913. His essay collection on the wonders of biology, The Lives of a Cell, won the National Book Award. Like a modern-day psalmist, Thomas wrote: “The recorded songs of the humpback whale, filled with tensions and resolutions, ambiguities and allusions, incomplete, can be listened to as a part of music, like an isolated section of an orchestra. If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic timpani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.”
November 26 is the birthday of American writer Marilynne Robinson, born in Sandpoint, Idaho, in 1943. Robinson is most famous for her Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel, Gilead, written in the form of letters from an elderly, ailing pastor to his young son.
Here’s a taste: "Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain. At times like that I might not care particularly whether people are listening to whatever I have to say, because I know where their thoughts are."
Robinson said: "I have spent my life watching, not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of the miracle is here, among us."
And again: “At this point, right across the traditions, there is nothing more valuable to be done than to make people understand that religion is beautiful and it is large.”
November 28 is Thanksgiving. Here’s SALT’s “Brief Theology of Thanksgiving.”
November 28 is also the birthday of poet and artist William Blake, born in London, England, in 1757. At the age of four, he had a vision of God at his bedroom window; and a few years later, on a walk he saw a tree filled with angels, their wings shining. He insisted that his dead brother appeared to him and taught him a new art he called “illuminated printing,” combining text and painting into one. Many of his contemporaries considered him insane; today he is widely recognized as a major poet and artist. His classic, “Auguries of Innocence,” begins with the lines:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour
November 29 is the birthday of writer C.S. Lewis, born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898. His mother died when he was young, and he became an atheist - a conviction that deepened after he was wounded on the front lines of France during WWI. But he loved mythology and Scandanavian epics, and as a professor at Oxford, befriended another young faculty member named J.R.R. Tolkien. A few days after a dinner with Tolkien and another friend discussing Christianity and myth, Lewis took a motorcycle ride with his brother to the Whipsnade Zoo - and on that ride, Lewis converted to Christianity: “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”
Lewis and Tolkien also formed a writing group they called “The Inklings.” The group would gather over a strong pot of tea late in the evening, and take turns reading aloud from their latest writing projects. Tolkien read from The Lord of the Rings, and Lewis from The Screwtape Letters, imagined advice from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew, Wormwood.
Then one day Lewis sat down to write a story for his goddaughter, Lucy, taking as a starting point an image of “a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood.” That story became The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first of The Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis also hosted a popular series of short radio addresses on understanding Christianity, and these later became the basis for his book, Mere Christianity - today regarded as one of the most influential theological books of the twentieth century.
November 29 is also the birthday of novelist Madeleine L’Engle, born in New York City in 1918. Theological themes permeate L’Engle’s writing, as do scientific ones. In fact, the turning point in her career was a book she read by Albert Einstein “in which he said that anyone who’s not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe is as good as a burnt-out candle.”
L’Engle became fascinated with Einstein’s work, read everything of his she could get her hands on, and ended up writing a science fiction novel for young people. Her own children loved it, but it was rejected by no less than 26 publishers. Finally a publisher took a chance on A Wrinkle in Time - and it became a sensation, winning the Newbery Medal. L’Engle later said, “I can’t possibly tell you how I came to write it… And it was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”
November 30 is the birthday of Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. Twain’s masterpiece, widely considered one of the classics of American literature, is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - and that story turns on a remarkable theological scene.
Huck has been traveling down the river with Jim, who’s recently escaped enslavement, and Jim has just been captured and imprisoned in a shed. Huck recalls a lesson from Sunday School that anyone who assists such fugitives, as Huck has been doing on their travels, “goes to everlasting fire.” Contemplating this supposed sin, Huck decides to repent and write a letter to Jim’s enslaver, Miss Watson, so she can send someone to apprehend her runaway property. He writes the letter, and as he holds it in his hands, feels a wave of relief. What follows is one of the great passages in American literature: theological, moral, poignant, ironic, comic, satirical, and deadly serious all at once. Huck tells it this way:
“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.
“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll go to hell" - and tore it up.
“It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”