Theologian's Almanac for Week of May 8, 2022
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, May 8:
May 8 is Mother’s Day, first celebrated in 1908 at a Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia, honoring Ann Reeves Jarvis, a peace activist who had cared for wounded soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. Her daughter, Ann Jarvis, campaigned tirelessly for a national day to honor all mothers, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the official proclamation into law. Almost immediately, companies began selling Mother’s Day greeting cards, flowers, and gifts — and Ann Jarvis, soon disgusted by the holiday’s commercialization, filed lawsuits against Hallmark and other companies to try and stop them.
May 8 is also believed to be the birthday of poet Phillis Wheatley, born in West Africa in 1753. Kidnapped at the age of eight and put on a slave ship, the Phillis, she was sold to a prominent tailor in Boston, John Wheatley, and was manumitted in 1778 — two years after George Washington invited her to his headquarters to meet her, so impressed was he with her poetry. She rarely wrote about herself or her life as a slave — with the notable exception of “On Being Brought from Africa to America,” a poem in which Wheatley pointedly admonishes “Christians” that “Negroes,” too, may “join th’ angelic train.”
May 8 is also the birthday of American poet Gary Snyder. A practicing Buddhist and environmental activist, Snyder spent several years living on a small island in the East China Sea, mediating daily. He then spent more than a decade in Japan studying Buddhism, living in monasteries and, because those monasteries had no books, at times renting a nearby apartment to catch up on reading and writing. Asked what Buddhism has taught him about poetry, he put it this way: “Changing the filter, wiping noses, going to meetings, picking up around the house, washing dishes, checking the dipstick — don’t let yourself think these are distracting you from your more serious pursuits.”
May 8 is also the Feast Day of Julian of Norwich, an English anchoress who experienced a vision in 1373, and wrote about it in Showings or Revelations of Divine Love — the earliest surviving book by a woman in the English language.
“And in this he showed me a little thing,” she wrote, “the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God. In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”
Her most famous line may be her most consoling (and a good word for our times today!): “but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”
May 11 is the anniversary of Bob Marley’s death in 1981. Marley’s lyrics are often shaped by his Rastafarian theology, and his songs — both political and romantic — are peppered with references to “Jah” (the Rasta word for God). Late in life, Marley was baptized into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and received an Ethiopian Orthodox funeral.
May 11 is also the day in 868 that the Diamond Sutra was published, one of the world’s oldest printed books (a scroll, actually) bearing a publication date. It’s a collection of Buddhist teachings (“sutra” means “teaching”) with the full title, “The Diamond that Cuts Through Illusions.” In 1900, a Taoist monk discovered it in a sealed cave along the Silk Road, where ancient monks had collected holy scriptures of various religions from travelers and pilgrims passing by.
May 12 is the birthday of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. She was born in 1820 to a wealthy English family, and as a young woman, she wrote to a friend: “God called me in the morning and asked me would I do good for him alone without reputation.” She visited a Lutheran religious community in Germany, and after observing the deaconesses care for the sick and destitute, she stayed for four months of medical training.
During the Crimean War, Nightingale and her team reduced a British military hospital’s death rate from 42 percent to 2 percent, mostly by introducing sanitary reforms. Insisting that patients require personal care, she roamed the hallways at night with a lantern, speaking with the wounded and eventually becoming known as the “Lady with the Lamp.” Her mathematical skill was equally illuminating: she was an excellent statistician, and created groundbreaking diagrams to help explain the spread of contagious disease.
May 14 is the birthday of filmmaker and philanthropist George Lucas, born in 1944 in Modesto, California. Getting started in the early 1970s, he said, “I saw that kids today don’t have any fantasy life the way we had — they don’t have Westerns, they don’t have pirate movies...” And so he set out to make a kind of outer space Western, channeling the Buck Rogers comic strips and Flash Gordon movies he’d loved growing up — all organized around a classic “hero’s journey” story, inspired by Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with the Thousand Faces. He had a hard time pulling together support for the project, but in the end, 20th Century Fox rolled the dice. The result was a juggernaut, the “Star Wars” saga, a series of films one critic later called, “the closest thing to shared religious belief among contemporary Americans.” May the Fourteenth be with you!