Words Twice a Week 5.2 really
(That last one should really have been Words 4.29. I guess I was a little slow getting it out, and ended up dating it for the sunday, not for the post date. Oops)
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 of the days from the church calendar for this week -
May 3 Elisabeth Cruciger She was born around 1500. It says she was the first female poet and hymnwriter for the Protestant Reformation. And a friend of Martin Luther. She married one of Luther’s assistants. So do we still sing any of her hymns? Not that I can discover – but maybe Lutherans?
Loving God, Mother and Father of us all,
bless today mothers everywhere
who are concerned for their sons and daughters.
May their tears be prayers that touch your heart.
Give them strength to persevere.
May their children bring them pride and joy
and love them well.
May 8 Julian of Norwich was an English anchorite of the Middle Ages. She wrote the best known surviving book in the English language written by a mystic, Revelations of Divine Love. The book is the first written in English by a known woman author. As an anchoress, she lived in a small cell stuck onto the church. There would have been a ceremony with psalms from the Office of the Dead being sung for her, as if it were her own funeral, and at some point Julian would have been led to her cell door and into the room beyond. The door would afterwards have been sealed up, and she would have remained in her cell for the rest of her life. There were people who left 40 pennies in their will to "the anchoress in the church of St. Julian's, Conisford, and a shilling each to her maid and her former maid Alice". She had a series of visions. She wrote, "For I saw no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love." She wrote that God sees us as perfect and waits for the day when human souls mature so that evil and sin will no longer hinder us. "God is nearer to us than our own soul," she wrote. This theme is repeated throughout her work: "Jesus answered with these words, saying: 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' ... This was said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else". Sidney Carter (Lord of the Dance) worked her words into a song All Shall Be Well/The Bells of Norwich.
May 9 Gregory of Nazianzus Gregory is a saint in both Eastern and Western Christianity. In the Catholic Church he is numbered among the Doctors of the Church; in the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Churches he is revered as one of the Three Holy Hierarchs, along with Basil the Great and John Chrysostom. He is considered one of the Great Fathers in both Eastern and Western Christianity.
And some of the days from the world/earth calendar -
May 3
+ Pete Seeger was born on this day in 1919. He was an activist, and he came by it naturally - his father was hired to establish the music department at University of California, Berekely, but had to resign because of his outspoken pacifism during WWI. Pete’s uncle, poet Alan Seeger (I have a Rendezvous with Death) was one of the first US soldiers killed in the war. (Although interestingly, [Alan] Seeger was living in Paris in 1914, when war was declared between France and Germany. He quickly volunteered to fight as a member of the French Foreign Legion, stating that he was motivated by his love for France and his belief in the Allies. For Seeger, fighting for the Allies was a moral imperative; in his poem "A Message to America," he spoke out against what he saw as America's moral failure to join the war.)
Pete wrote Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Turn, Turn, Turn, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, If I Had A Hammer, My Rainbow Race, and a boatload of others. He helped popularize the civil rights song We Shall Overcome. And in general just really supported “folk singing”.
+ a tornado in 1999 hit Oklahoma City with windspeed of 301 mph, highest ever recorded.
+ Breakfast at Tiffany’s (the book) was published in 1958. Haven’t read it; haven’t even seen the movie, though I think Margie did the other night.
May 4
+ and it’s the birthday (1929) of Audrey Hepburn, speaking of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and a bunch of other films. Have a favorite?
+ Star Wars Day – “May the fourth be with you.” Good day to watch one? Have a favorite?
+ Kent State killings (1970) Four students killed, nine wounded when the National Guard fired into a crowd of students protesting Nixon’s expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia. W Paul Jones notes “This tragedy made indelible the already deep division within this country, for now even the cherished right to protest had become viewed as enemy behavior.”
+ on this day in 1956 The General Conference of the United Methodist Church granted full clergy rights to women.
+ The first Freedom Riders left Washington DC for New Orleans. When they reached Alabama the first bus was stoned, it’s tires slashed, and firebombed. The riders on a second bus were beaten when the FBI and local police stayed away from the bus depot.
+ in 1675, King Charles II commissioned a Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Got the time?
May 5
+ Cy Young pitched the first perfect baseball game in 1904.
+ it’s the birthday of Soren Kierkegarrd in 1813, Karl Marx in 1818
+ the first Three Stooges film was released in 1934
May 6
+ the English Channel tunnel opened in 1994.
+ Roger Bannister ran the first 4 minute mile (3:59.4) in 1954
+ The Hindenburg exploded in 1937.
+ Orson Wells was born in 1915; L Frank Baum died in 1919. Together they gave us an invasion from Mars and a trip to Oz.
May 7
+ Michigan ratified the 27th Amendment to the Constitution. It was one of the first proposed, but the last ratified (after 202 years, 10 months, and 7 days). It had originally been part of the proposed Bill of Rights, but was never ratified. It was pretty much forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a paper for a government class in which he claimed that the amendment could still be ratified. An unconvinced teaching assistant graded the paper poorly, motivating Watson to launch a nationwide campaign to complete its ratification. Originally it was thought that Michigan’s May 7, 1992 ratification was the needed 38th state, but on later examination, it was discovered that Kentucky had ratified it during it’s first month of statehood in 1792. Quick now – what does the 27th Amendment say?
May 8
+ Coca Cola invented in 1886.
+ Let It Be, the Beatles last studio album was released in 1970.
+ Legendary bluesman Robert Johnson was born in 1911. Meet me at the crossroads? Naomi Klein in 1970. This Changes Everything. Did it? Does it? Will it?
+ in 1978 Messner and Habeler climbed Mt Everest without supplemental oxygen.
May 9
+ Tenzing Norgay died in 1986, speaking of those who climbed Mt Everest!
+ Paul Gauguin died in 1903. We remember him for paintings of Tahiti, about the opposite end of the climate spectrum from Mt Everest.
+ the first “birth control pill” was approved by the US FDA in 1960
+ Billy Joel was born in 1949. Piano Man, I Love You Just the Way You Are
That’s what I got for now….
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