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.
Some days from the church calendar -
Mar 8 Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy MC (1883–1929) was an English Anglican priest and poet. He was nicknamed Woodbine Willie during World War I for giving Woodbine cigarettes along with spiritual aid to injured and dying soldiers. Ok, I would have passed over this guy, but he turned out rather interesting. “During the war he supported the British military effort with enthusiasm. Attached to a bayonet-training service, chaplain Studdert Kennedy toured with boxers and wrestlers to give morale-boosting speeches about the usefulness of the bayonet (Interesting!)….Converted to Christian socialism and pacifism during the war, he wrote Lies, and Democracy and the Dog-Collar, featuring such chapters as "The Church Is Not a Movement but a Mob", "Capitalism is Nothing But Greed, Grab, and Profit-Mongering" and "So-Called Religious Education Worse than Useless". An advocate for the working class, he said "If finding God in our churches leads to us losing Him in our factories, then better we tear down those churches for God must hate the sight of them." He wrote Roses in December which J.M. Barrie quoted in his “Courage” speech, if you know what that is. (Interesting to have this right after hearing about Jesus tossing the animal sellers and the money changers out of the temple last Sunday!)
Mar 9 Gregory – (c335-94) bishop of Nyssa and one of the Cappadocian Fathers, along with his elder brother Basil of Caesarea, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. He made significant contribution to the doctrine of the Trinity and the Nicene Creed.
Mar 12 Gregory, again, this time Gregory the Great. He was the son of a Roman senator, born during the plague of Justinian which in some places wiped out up to a third of the population. He himself became a prefect of Rome at age 30. When his father died, he turned the family villa into a monastery and lived as a benedictine for a while, but soon returned to active public life, ending his career and the century as pope. Although he was the first pope from a monastic background, his prior political experiences may have helped him to be a talented administrator. During his papacy, he greatly surpassed with his administration the emperors in improving the welfare of the people of Rome. He also sent a mission to evangelize the Anglo-Saxons in England, and from there to the Netherlands and Germany. He impressed on his followers the value of bathing as a bodily need. And he was the first to extensively use the term “Servant of the servants of God” as a title. He died on Mar 12, 604.
Mar 13 James Theodore Holly - the first African-American Bishop in the Protestant Episcopal Church. (I admit, I’m not always clear on the terminology – I don’t know if that’s just the Episcopal Church, or some faction of!) He was rector of St. Luke's Church, New Haven, Connecticut, when in 1861 he led 110 African Americans and Canadians to emigrate to Haiti where they established Holy Trinity church and school. He was consecrated as missionary bishop of Haiti by the American Church Missionary Society, an Evangelical Episcopal faction, in a ceremony at Grace Episcopal Church in New York.
Now some days from the world/earth calendar
+ Joe Frazier defeated Muhammad Ali in 1971. They both had claim to the title “heavyweight champion according to different authorities. Ali had had his WBC/WBA title stripped for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. Frazier won by decision in 15 rounds. Ali won two rematches in 1974 and 1975.
+ the New York Stock Exchange was founded in 1817.
Mar 9
+ construction of the Alaska Highway began in 1942. Gotta get those sled dogs there somehow!
+ the space shuttle Discovery touched down for the final time in 2011. The video of the SpaceX rocket landing was pretty impressive. Until it blew up, though I guess that was impressive in it’s own way.
+ Barbie went on sale in 1959. Buy all things Barbie here. There are 351 items to choose from, and that is just a start.
+ George Burns died in 1996 He was the best “God” ever – in my humble opinion.
Mar10
+ “Mario Day” – that would be the plumber guy with the mustache. Mar10 looks like Mario – get it?
+ Harriet Tubman died in 1913. She was an escaped slave who helped organize and guide other escaping slaves through the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War she served as a scout and a spy for the Union army. On April 20, 2016, then-U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew announced plans to add a portrait of Tubman to the front of the twenty-dollar bill, moving the portrait of President Andrew Jackson, himself a slave owner, to the rear of the bill. Lew instructed the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to expedite the redesign process, and the new bill was expected to enter circulation sometime after 2020. However, in 2017 U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that he would not commit to putting Tubman on the twenty-dollar bill, saying, "People have been on the bills for a long period of time. This is something we'll consider; right now we have a lot more important issues to focus on." In 2021, under the Biden administration, the Treasury Department resumed the effort to add Tubman's portrait to the front of the $20 bill and hoped to expedite the process.
+ Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call to Watson in 1876. It was a short landline affair.
Mar 11
+ James Reeb died in 1965. He was a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston who responded to Martin Luther King’s call for ministers to join the Selma to Montgomery March. He got there, was hit in the head with a club, and died two days later.
+ The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011. Here’s a virtual tour – not sure when it is from. Of course it was caused by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami which killed 15,899 people.
+ in 1987 the UN recognized the Conscious Objection alternative to military service as a human right.
+ Douglas Adams was born in 1952 he wrote The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy; Rupert Murdoch was born in 1931. He owns a good chunk of the news media reporting on the galaxy, and Fox News is sometimes itself the story as well as telling it. “Fair and Balanced”, “Most Watched, Most Trusted”, “Real News. Real Honest Opinion”, and now “Standing Up for What’s Right”. What do you think – reporting on the problem, or the problem itself?
Mar 12
+ Gandhi started on the Salt March (24 days, 240 miles) in 1930 as a nonviolent protest against the British Salt monopoly. The aftermath led to the decline of British domination.
+ FDR began his fireside chats on this day in 1933.
+ Hitler invaded Austria in 1938.
+ 32 women were ordained Anglican priests for the first time in England in 1994. Other women had been ordained in other parts of the Anglican communion previously, the first being Florence Li Tim-Oi, who was ordained on 25 January 1944 in China.
Mar 13
+ Susan B Anthony died in 1906. She was a leader in the woman’s suffrage movement and in the emancipation of African Americans. She was arrested for voting in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and convicted in a widely publicized trial. Although she refused to pay the fine, the authorities declined to take further action. She became the first female citizen to have her image on a US coin – the 1979 Susan B Anthony dollar.
+ Pope Francis succeeded Pope Benedict XVI in 2013. Now he’s gone to Iraq!
+ Neil Sedaka was born in 1939. He sang Stairway to Heaven, Little Devil, Calendar Girl, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, and Next Door to an Angel. He dated Carol King in high school and used her name in O Carol. King’s husband wrote a playful response Oh! Neil! which apparently didn’t really go anywhere.
Mar 14 (spring forward!)
+ pi day!! Pecan? Pizza? Apple? Blueberry? Turkey pot? Pasty? What are you going with?
+ Karl Marx, primary theorist for modern socialism and communism died in 1883. W Paul Jones notes that several ancient and contemporary societies (including the Jewish Essenes, the early Christian church, most monasteries and religious orders, the Amana Society and Oneida Community, and today the Bruderhof Communities) practiced corporate ownership and communal living. What is attractive to you about the idea? What might be problematic?
+ Albert Einstein was born in 1879; Stephen Hawking died in 2018. Seems like they might have been kind of kindred spirits - their lives overlapped by 13 years.
+ on this day in 1942, the first patient was treated for streptococcal sepsis with US-made penicillin produced by Merck & Co. After a worldwide search in 1943, a moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, market was found to contain the best strain of mold for production using the corn steep liquor process. Pfizer scientist Jasper H. Kane suggested using a deep-tank fermentation method for producing large quantities of pharmaceutical-grade penicillin. Just a couple of interesting names there. And the idea of what might come out of moldy stuff at a market!
Seems like there ought to be a poem or a prayer on getting the word from here to there – stairways, highways (through the galaxy or to Alaska), roads, railroads, marches, telephone lines, space shuttles, dog sleds – well that’s gotten a little bit too broad. Challenge for the week – pick one and write a poem about it! We’ll see.
That’s what I got for now….
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