Theologian's Almanac for Week of May 28, 2023
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 28:
May 28 is the birthday of the American novelist Walker Percy, born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. During a bout with tuberculosis as a young man, he read Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Kierkegaard. After publishing some spiritual and philosophical essays, he had an epiphany: “The thought crossed my mind: Why not do what French philosophers often do and Americans almost never — novelize philosophy, incarnate ideas in a person and a place, which latter is, after all, a noble Southern tradition in fiction.” He won the National Book Award for The Moviegoer, in which the main character, Binx Bolling, goes on a spiritual and philosophical quest. Bolling says, “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”
May 28 is also the day President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830. In 1823, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the white settlers' “right of discovery” superseded the Indians' “right of occupancy.” The Removal Act primarily affected five tribes: the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations of the southeastern United States. Approximately 100,000 people were forcibly marched thousands of miles — sometimes in chains — to lands west of the Mississippi, most of which had been deemed worthless by white settlers. The journey became known as “The Trail of Tears.” As many as 25% of the group’s men, women, and children perished along the way.
May 29 is the birthday of G.K. Chesterton, born in London in 1874. He’s best known for his stories featuring Father Brown, a crime-solving priest who appears to be ignorant, clumsy, and absent-minded, falling asleep during police interrogations, and so on — but who in fact knows more about crime anyone else in the stories, including the criminals. Chesterton invented the character when he converted to Catholicism and realized that Catholic priests, who hear confessions all day long, are veritable experts in depravity. Chesterton was remarkably prolific, and theology animates much of his work; his biography of St. Francis, for example, is a delightful classic. One of his signatures is to express serious ideas with a twinkle in his eye. “Thieves respect property,” he wrote. “They merely wish the property to become their property, that they may more perfectly respect it."
May 29 is also Memorial Day, a day honoring American military veterans who have died in the midst of war. The brainchild of General John A. Logan, the first Memorial Day observance was in 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, where members of both the Union and Confederate Armies were buried. Logan declared the day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
May 30 is the 101st anniversary of the day the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922. The structure was modeled on the Parthenon; a defender of democracy, the architect said, should be remembered with an homage to the birthplace of democracy. The marble and granite came from Massachusetts, Colorado, Georgia, Tennessee, Indiana, and Alabama, an arrangement meant to symbolize a divided nation reconciling in order to build something new together.
And yet, divisions persisted, then and now. A crowd of more than 50,000 attended the Memorial’s dedication ceremony that day — but though Lincoln was known as the Great Emancipator, the audience was segregated, and keynote speaker Robert Moton, president of the Tuskegee Institute and an African American, wasn’t permitted to sit on the speakers’ platform. 41 years later, on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I have a dream” speech from the Memorial steps.
May 31 — June 1 will mark the 102nd anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre in 1921, in which white mobs, including people armed and deputized by city authorities, brutally attacked African-American people, homes, businesses, churches, schools, and other municipal buildings in the prosperous Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, burning virtually the entire neighborhood to the ground. During the chaos, the mobs savagely assaulted the newly-built Mount Zion Baptist Church with a machine gun mounted on the back of a truck, ultimately setting the building on fire. After the massacre, despite the church building’s total loss and its remaining mortgage debt (the insurance company refused to cover the damages), the Mount Zion congregration vowed to rebuild. Over twenty years, they paid down the original mortgage — and then built a new building on the site, finally dedicated in 1952, more than 30 years after the massacre. The Tulsa Preservation Commission puts it this way: “Mount Zion Baptist Church remains a testimony to the perseverance and tenacity of its congregants and the Black community in Greenwood."
June 2 is the day the Salem Witch Trials were convened in Salem Town, Massachusetts. The mass paranoia and panic had begun in January of that year, 1692, when a few preteen and teenage girls, including the daughter of the village’s minister, began having fits and reporting the sensation of being poked or pricked. The village doctor, unable to diagnose a cause, concluded that they must be bewitched — which led the adults to pressure the girls into naming their assailants.
No doubt picking up on the prejudices of their elders, the girls blamed Tituba, the minister’s slave; Sarah Good, a local homeless woman; and Sarah Osborne, an outcast who rarely attended church services. Local residents were aghast at the report of witchcraft, and soon “respected churchgoers,” too (including some who had the presence of mind to question the children’s accounts) fell under the growing cloud of suspicion. Paranoia stirred up paranoia, with some exploiting the atmosphere to play out quarrels or settle old scores. In the end, over 200 people were accused, and 19 were found guilty and sentenced to execution (14 women and 5 men).
Some later expressed remorse or formally apologized to their congregations for participating in the mob mentality, or for failing to speak out against it. In 1695, examiner John Hale wrote, “Such was the darkness of the day, and so great the lamentations of the afflicted, that we walked in the clouds and could not see our way.”
Today in Boston’s State House are five murals depicting key moments in early Massachusetts history, collectively entitled, “Milestones on the Road to Freedom.” One of them features Judge Samuel Sewall standing in the South-Meeting House of Boston, head bowed, while the Rev. Samuel Willard reads aloud Sewall’s statement of repentance for his involvement in the witch trials. Sewall was the only one of the nine participating judges who publicly repented. The mural, painted by the artist Albert Herter in 1942, is entitled, “Dawn of Tolerance in Massachusetts.”
June 3 is the Feast Day of St. Coemgen (anglicized as St. Kevin), founder of Glendalough monastery in Ireland in the sixth century. Legend has it that Kevin was profoundly connected with the natural world. On one occasion, the story goes, Kevin was holding out his arms in solemn, contemplative stillness and prayer, palms facing up, and a blackbird came and laid an egg in the palm of his hand — whereupon the young monk resolved to hold himself still until the egg hatched. And here’s another: it’s said that Kevin once prepared a meal for his fellow monks, a feast featuring salmon kindly caught and delivered to him by an otter!
Kevin is the patron saint of blackbirds, and of Dublin.