Theologian's Almanac for Week of February 18, 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 18:
February 18 is the birthday of American novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931. After a stint teaching at Howard University, she worked as an editor at Random House, raising her two sons as a single parent in New York. And then she began a project: while her boys were asleep late at night or in the early morning, she would work on a novel about a black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who desperately wanted blue eyes. After many rejections, The Bluest Eye was finally accepted for publication in 1970; Morrison was 39 years old.
Still working as an editor, she helped compile The Black Book, an anthology of archival materials documenting the African-American experience. Among those materials was a short article about Margaret Garner, a young mother who escaped enslavement in 1856 — and when the enslavers caught up with her, she killed her two-year-old daughter in order to spare her from slavery. Morrison decided to write a novel inspired by Garner’s story because there were no memorials to the millions of victims of enslavement. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she said. “And because such a place doesn’t exist… the book had to.” Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and Morrison received the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993.
Here’s Morrison (from her novel, Paradise) on God and love.
February 18 is also the birthday of Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1883. He’s best known for Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ, the latter of which was banned by the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches for portraying Jesus as tempted to cast off his divinity and lead an ordinary human life (he resists the temptation in the end). Kazantzakis himself, however, insisted that “every free man who reads this book, so filled as it is with love, will more than ever before, better than ever before, love Christ.”
February 19 is the day in 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, the order that ended up authorizing the internment camps in which 120,000 people, more than half of them Japanese-American citizens, were forcibly detained. In 1981, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians concluded that the order was a “grave injustice” resulting from “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” President Reagan offered survivors an apology and $20,000 each in 1988.
February 20 is the birthday of photographer Ansel Adams, born in San Francisco, California, in 1902. Adams had difficulty sitting still and focusing in school, and was expelled several times. “Each day was a severe test for me, sitting in a dreadful classroom while the sun and fog played outside,” he later recalled. “I longed for the outdoors.” Exasperated, his parents began homeschooling him at the age of 12 — and when he was 14, they gave him two life-changing gifts: a Kodak #1 Box Brownie camera, and a family trip to Yosemite National Park. Adams was completely enthralled, and would return to the park every summer without fail for the rest of his life. His images of American landscapes are now among the most famous photographs in the world.
He said: “Sometimes I arrive just when God's ready to have someone click the shutter.”
February 22 is the anniversary of the death of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in 1911, abolitionist, suffragist, poet, novelist, and one of the first African-American women to be published in the United States. (Check out her portrait at the top of this post!)
Here’s a taste of her advocacy:
Addressing the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1866, Harper said, “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro... You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me... While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.”
And here’s a taste of her poetry, an excerpt from “Bible Defense of Slavery”:
A “reverend” man, whose light should be
The guide of age and youth,
Brings to the shrine of Slavery
The sacrifice of truth!
February 22 is also the birthday of Edna St. Vincent Millay, born “between the mountains and the sea” in Rockland, Maine, in 1892. She was one of the most celebrated poets of her time, a free spirit and a romantic. In her younger days, she lived in an attic apartment on Bedford Street in New York City that was nine feet long and six feet wide; it was the narrowest house in the City, and today is known as “The Millay House.” She later lived in “Steepletop,” a sprawling property in Austerlitz, New York. After her death, the young poet Mary Oliver made her way to Steepletop to pay homage — and ended up staying there for seven years, helping Millay’s sister, Norma, organize the poet’s papers.
Here’s a taste of Millay’s theology (you can feel the influence on Oliver!):
“God's World”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists, that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, — Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, — let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
February 23 is the day in 1455 that the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible commenced in Mainz, Germany. Prior to Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, every book in Europe had been painstakingly copied out by hand (Chinese artisans by then had been printing books for more than five hundred years, unbeknownst to Europe). The first book Gutenberg printed with his new machine was the Bible; he produced 45 copies of the nearly 1,300-page volume on calfskin vellum, and another 135 copies on paper made from linen clothing.
February 23 is also the birthday of scholar and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868. He was the valedictorian of his high school class, and the town raised funds for him to attend Fisk University in Tennessee. At Fisk, Du Bois encountered Jim Crow laws for the first time: voter suppression and segregated drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, banks, schools, transportation, and lodging. He decided to devote his life and work to the study and dismantling of racism, and the advancement of people of color.
Du Bois went on to study in Germany and Massachusetts, and became the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard University. In 1905, Du Bois met with 30 other African-American scholars and activists in Canada, near Niagara Falls (because blacks weren’t allowed to stay in white-owned hotels in the United States). This meeting kicked off a discussion that eventually resulted in the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. At the age of 95, Du Bois became a naturalized citizen of Ghana, where he died in August of 1963 — the day before Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his now-famous speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
February 23 is also the birthday of composer George Handel, born in Halle, Germany, in 1685. After moving to England and becoming the Master of the Orchestra at the Royal Academy of Music, he was asked by King George for a concert on the River Thames, and for this occasion, Handel wrote his now-legendary “Water Music.” On a summer evening in 1717, the king boarded a barge on the river, and another barge floated nearby, carrying about 50 musicians along with Handel himself. Londoners boarded boats and barges, too, and listened to the concert from the shorelines. King George was so delighted that he ordered the music to be repeated three times, up and down the River Thames.
In 1741, Handel was asked to do a benefit in Dublin, and for this occasion, he worked feverishly on a new oratorio, often neglecting meals and sleep. In just over three weeks, he wrote “The Messiah,” one of the most recognizable pieces in the history of Western music. At the end of the score, he scrawled, Sola Deo Gloria, “To God Alone the Glory.” Upon finishing the work, it is said, he exclaimed, “I think God has visited me!”
February 23 is also the day in 1940 that Woody Guthrie wrote the lyrics to “This Land Is Your Land” — now one of America’s most celebrated folk songs, and for many, the country’s unofficial national anthem. Its melody is from an old Baptist hymn, and Guthrie wrote the lyrics in response to what he considered the pompous and pretentious “God Bless America,” written by Irving Berlin. Guthrie didn’t perform “This Land is Your Land” until 1944, and it didn’t become widely known until the 1960s, when Bob Dylan covered it, and it became a popular anthem during the Civil Rights movement.
February 24 is the birthday of the American poet Jane Hirshfield, born in New York City in 1953. Born to Jewish parents who were only occasionally observant, she eventually became an ordained lay practitioner of Zen Buddhism. She came to California to be a writer, and decided to take a detour: “I was curious about Zen and knew there was a monastery, Tassajara, in the Ventana Wilderness inland from Big Sur. Because it was the summer guest season rather than the stricter winter practice period time, I was able to drive in over the rather perilous 14-mile dirt road and stay for a week as a ‘guest student’... I decided to stay a few months, until I understood what Buddhism was all about. After a few months, what you understand is that you know nothing about what Buddhism is all about… I think of this time as the diamond at the center of my life. Whoever I now am came out of that experience.” After eight years at the monastery, she returned to writing and translating poetry. Her edited anthology, Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, is now a classic.
Here’s a taste of her poetic brilliance: “Tree.”