A few days from the church calendar -
Nov 30 Saint Andrew/Andrew the Apostle He was Simon Peter’s brother. In Matthew and Mark he is fishing with Simon when Jesus calls them. In John he is a disciple of John the Forerunner, who recognizes Jesus as the Messiah and goes to tell his brother. Here’s the collect for his day -
Almighty God, who gave such grace to your apostle Andrew
that he readily obeyed the call of your Son Jesus Christ,
and brought his brother with him:
Give us, who are called by your holy Word,
grace to follow him without delay,
and to bring those near to us into his gracious presence;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Dec 3 FrancisXavier He helped found the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, and was one of their first missionaries, to the Far East.
Dec 4 John of Damascus These guys were church
Dec 5 Clement of Alexandria leaders along the way.
Dec 6 Nicolas, Bishop of Myra wait a minute, that’s Santa Claus! Check it out.
And some days from the world/earth calendar -
Nov 30
+ Mary Harris (Mother Jones) – antiwar activist and labor organizer died in 1930. An outspoken socialist, she co-founded the Industrial Workers of the World. She said her home was “wherever there was a fight.” She was denounced in the U.S. Senate as “the grandmother of all agitators” but when she was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison, the Senate ordered a committee to investigate conditions in the West Virginia coalfields.
+ Mark Twain was born in 1835; Winston Churchill in 1874.
+ Lucy and Desi got married in 1940
+ Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was released in 1982. (Confession – I never really listened to it!)
+ Evil Knievel died in 2007. He started selling insurance, and then went on to (motorcycle) jumping cars, buses, rivers, and many other things. According to the wikipedia piece, he seems to have crashed about as much as landed safely. He died of pulmonary disease.
Dec 1
+ Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery.
Dec 2
+ Aaron Copland died in 1990, after writing, among many other pieces, Fanfare for the Common Man, and ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring. As to the last, he apparently didn’t have a title for it until just before it premiered, when Martha Graham suggested “Appalachian Spring”, from a poem by Hart Crane. Actually the “spring” in the poem is a spring of water, but the piece moves us towards springtime.
+ John Brown was hanged in 1859, the first person to be executed for treason in the United States. He was an abolitionist, “an intensely religious man who at one point studied for the ministry.” He became convinced that only force would overthrow slavery in the southern states and led a raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry. For a few years after that, he was the most famous person in the United States.
Dec 3
+ Robert Louis Stevenson died. He wrote Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. That really covers the spectrum, doesn’t it? You can hear children reading from A Child’s Garden, with accompaniment by Rob Honey and artwork by various artists here.
+ Joseph Conrad was born in 1857.
Dec 4
+ Walt Disney was born in 1901. I can’t begin to count the ways he and his company have influenced life today. Where would we go after winning the Super Bowl?
Dec 5
+ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in 1792. What can we say – he was Mozart.
+ Claude Monet died in 1926. A founder of Impressionism, which comes from the title of his painting Impression, sunrise. He specialized in painting landscapes in the open air, haystacks, women with parasols, towards the end often water lilies. “Lilies of the Agreement”? You can see a selection here. “When a visitor to Monet’s home in France recently expressed disappointment over Monet’s small restored lily pond, he was told ‘You saw it through your eyes rather than his.’” (W Paul Jones)
Dec 6
+ birthday of Dave Brubeck in 1920. From the website “Dave’s career spanned over six decades, and his experiments in odd time signatures, improvised counterpoint, polyrhythm and polytonality remain hallmarks of innovation.” Hear Brahms Lullaby here and Over the Rainbow here, recorded as gifts for his grandchildren. He died Dec 5, 2012, a day before his 92 birthday.
I guess that’s it. Want a challenge for the week – write a poem for your garden of verses that would go with a painting by Monet!
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