If you are more into listening than reading, Words Twice a Week is available, along with other good stuff, as a podcast from St Paul’s Episcopal Church. Click here.
And I will try to add a couple of pictures this week, even though that seems to screw up the Blogger formatting! (Ok - the pictures did not make it through!)
A few days from the church calendar -
Feb 1 Brigid of Kildare (c.451-525) She was an Irish saint, one of the “big three” (Patrick and Columba). Along with seven companions, she is credited with organizing communal consecrated religious life for women in Ireland, including founding a monastery at Kildare (Cill Dara: "church of the oak"), on the site of a pagan shrine to the Celtic goddess Brigid, served by a group of young women who tended an eternal flame. (Ok, I’m glad she founded the monastery, but the pagan shrine with the eternal flame sounds kind of cool, too!) She also founded a school of art, particularly metalurgy and illumination, which produced something called the Book of Kildare, which may or may not have actually been a “mis-remembered” Book of Kells! She is a patron saint of a wide variety of groups, from blacksmiths; boatmen; brewers; cattle; chicken farmers; Florida (?); midwives; milk maids; nuns; poets; poor; poultry raisers; printing presses; sailors; and scholars among them.
Feb 2 Feast of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (Candlemas) Ok – growing up Methodist/United Methodist, (despite what wikipedia says!) we didn’t have “Candlemas” – we just barely had Advent and Lent – we sure didn’t bring our candles to the church to get them blessed. It just sounds too cool – we would have loved it. So – get out a new candle? Make a new candle? Burn it each Sunday? Burn it at special events through the year? I’m good with it.
Feb 3 The Dorchester Chaplains This has to do with the sinking of the SS Dorchester, a merchant ship converted to a troop carrier in WW2. When it was torpedoed and sunk off Newfoundland on Feb 3, 1943, these four chaplains helped soldiers get into lifeboats, even giving up their life vests when the supply ran short, then joined arms, said prayers, and sang hymns as they went down with the ship. They were Methodist, Jewish, Catholic, and Reformed. The post office issued a stamp in 1948, unusual because U.S. stamps were not normally issued in honor of someone other than a President of the United States until at least ten years after his or her death. (They didn’t put their names on the stamp, so they claimed they were honoring the event, not the individuals.)
Feb 7 Cornelius the Centurian First Gentile (non-Jew) baptized into the Christian faith, by Peter, after he had had the vision of all kinds of creatures being lowered from above and the voice “Rise Peter, Kill and eat.” (Yes, a little odd, but in the context of “clean/unclean” it works.) When Cornelius (acting on his own vision) sends for Peter and they tell each other about their visions, and Cornelius and friends start speaking in tongues, Peter says “Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?” (Acts 10:47) Significant that this first “breaking out” of the Christian experience involves Peter, who later seemed to pull back while Paul became “The Apostle to the Gentiles”.
A some days from the world/earth calendar
Feb 1
+ Imbolc – a Gaelic (spring?) festival, halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. Some connection with St Brigit’s day (above). It’s also an international arts festival.
+ in 1965 Martin Luther King Jr and more than 200 others were arrested in Selma, Alabama, after peacefully demonstrating for voting rights for African Americans.
Feb 2
+ James Joyce was born in 1882, and he published Ulysses on this day in 1922.
+ in 1925, Norwegian musher Gunnar Kaasen and his lead dog Balto, arrived on Front Street in Nome on February 2 at 5:30am with serum to fight the diphtheria epidemic. This year’s race starts on March 7, with a comprehensive COVID-19 mitigation plan. The plan is built on checkpoint “bubbles,” robust testing protocols, mandatory face masks, social distancing and reducing staff to only crucial positions. And we won’t be going all the way to Nome this year, teams will depart Deshka Landing and travel the Iditarod Gold Trail Loop out to the mining ghost town of Flat before looping back to the traditional Iditarod southern route in a course that is approximately 860 miles. On this route, the teams will travel through the Alaska Range, traverse the Happy River Steps and navigate the notorious Dalzell Gorge, twice. And if using dogs sounds too cushy, there is also an Iditarod Trail race on bike, foot, or skis that starts on Feb 28. (The 1000 mile race is canceled for this year – so it’s just 350 miles. You could do that.)
+ in 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, killing the crew of 7. Apparently a piece of the insulation had broken off. The ground crew apparently didn’t even investigate it all that fully, because there wouldn’t have been anything the crew could have done about it anyway. From this time on, the shuttle was only used for missions to the space station, so the crew would have someplace to stay if the shuttle was damaged on take-off.
Feb 3
+ in 1977 Iris Rivera was fired from her job as a legal secretary when she refused to make coffee for her boss, a significant event in the woman’s movement. There were protests and she got her job back. “Hey Babe, make mine a large – no cream, no sugar.”
Feb 4
+ Facebook was founded. Like it? (I don’t do Facebook, which I admit cuts me out of a significant part of life today.) Does it have too much power? Is it a force more for good or for ill?
+ a whole slew of birthdays – Charles Lindberg in 1902 (One Summer, America 1927 is a really good book by Bill Bryson – the Walk in the Woods guy – about Lindberg and the other things going on in 1927 when Lindberg made his flight. He was a celebrity but with some pretty significant issues – antisemitism, and then it has come out that he secretly fathered several children with three different German women, two of them sisters.)
+ Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in 1906. He was anti-Nazi, a founding member of the Confessing Church which spoke against Hitler. He came to America as the war was breaking out, but returned to be active in underground seminaries and the German resistance. He was arrested on April 5, 1943 and executed two years later on April 9, 1945 at Flossenburg concentration camp, just 2 weeks before it was liberated by US forces. He wrote The Cost of Discipleship which has become a classic. He warned about the danger of settling for “cheap grace” - “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
+ Rosa Parks was born in 1913;
+ and Alice Cooper in 1948. I have this memory of rollerskating to I Never Cry around the basement of the Episcopal church in St Ignace. I don’t know – that seems pretty unlikely. I was doing a summer ecumenical resort ministry in St Ignace, but still….
+ Adolphe Sax died in 1894. He invented the – wait for it – the saxophone.
+ The Confederate States of America was established in 1861.
Feb 5
+ “Welcome Stranger”, the world’s largest gold nugget (97 kg) was found in 1869 by two Cornish miners in Australia. Here’s a BBC piece about the 150 anniversary 2 years ago.
Feb 6
+ the birthday in 1895 of Babe Ruth. Interestingly, Babe Ruth’s home run effort is another of the stories Bill Bryson follows in One Summer.
+ in 1952 Elizabeth II became Queen of England.
+ in 1959 Jack Kirby patented the microchip, making all of this possible. And by all of this I mean pretty much life today. Think about it.
+ Frankie Laine died in 2007. He sang Mule Train, and Cool Water, and the theme song for several movies and tv shows - Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 3:10 to Yuma, Blazing Saddles, and - Rawhide. He also played a significant role in the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s. When Nat King Cole's television show was unable to get a sponsor, Laine crossed the color line, becoming the first white artist to appear as a guest (forgoing his usual salary of $10,000.00 as Cole's show only paid scale). In 1965, Laine joined several African American artists who gave a free concert for Martin Luther King Jr.'s supporters during their Selma to Montgomery marches.
Feb 7
+ the Beatles first performance in the US. Well, apparently they arrived on the 7th and gave their first actual performance on the 9th, while you and I and 40% of Americans watched it on the Ed Sullivan Show. I didn’t really scream and jump up and down, but maybe you did?
+ birthday of Charles Dickens in 1812 – he gave us much of the Christmas we now have; and “Symbol of Unity Amazing Grace singer” Garth Brooks in 1962.
+ in 2009, bushfires in Australia killed 173 people.
That’s what I got for now….
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