Words 12.12

 Words Twice a Week        12.12 

Well, once again I’m a day or two late – 12/13? - yup, made it with an hour to spare!

Some days from the church calendar -

(and it is an interesting crew of saints and others that the church remembers this week – not really big names, outside of St Lucia, but worth clicking the link and scanning the Wikipedia story on any one of them...)

Dec 13 – St Lucia/Saint Lucy Well ,she lived in the late 200’s, and was a martyr.  A difficult one – she was sentenced to be defiled in a brothel, but when the guards came for her they could not move her, even with a team of oxen!  When they piled straw and wood around her to burn her, it wouldn’t light.  Finally someone stabbed her in the throat.  And there are a couple of stories about her eyes being gouged out – either by herself or someone else – before she died.  So she is often pictured holding a plate with two eyes on it!  Anyway – candles, light, St Lucia buns – I guess I’d go with just a package of cinnamon rolls!

Dec 14 – Elizabeth Evelyn Wright – She founded Denmark Industrial Institute in Denmark, South Carolina, as a school for African-American youth. It is present-day Voorhees College, a historically black college (HBCU). She was a humanitarian and educator, founding several schools for black children.  Her father, John Wesley Wright, was an African-American carpenter. Her mother, Virginia Rolfe, was a Cherokee woman. Wright went to a school held in a church basement.  In 1888, she matriculated at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute as a night student. After two years, Wright moved to Hampton County, South Carolina to assist in a rural school for black children. After the school was burned, she returned to Tuskegee and graduated.

Dec 15  John Horden  He was the first Anglican Bishop of Moosonee, Canada.  He was born in England (1828) and apprenticed to a blacksmith.  He was an active member of the congregation and attended the vicar’s Bible class, which also offered information about missionary opportunities.  Three of the class members volunteered for the Church Missionary society – Horden was rejected because he was thought to be too young to be a church leader in “heathen” areas.  Later he heard from them that the Bishop of Rupert's Land, had made a request for a schoolmaster at Moose Factory, territory of the Hudson's Bay Company, and that he had been appointed to fill the position. They also told him to prepare to leave within a month and indicated that they desired that he marry and take his wife out to assist him in his missionary work!   He contacted his fiancée of one year, Elizabeth Baker, a teacher who trained at The Home and Colonial School Society, and who also had missionary aspirations, and they quickly married (May 28, 1851)!  On June 8, 1851, the young couple set sail for North America.  The ship arrived at Moose River on August 26 and the passengers were delivered to Moose Factory. The young couple lived at the residence of Chief Factor Robert Miles, affording them some time to acclimate to the daily routines at Moose Factory before moving into the repaired Methodist parsonage just ahead of winter. It was Miles who had persistently urged for a replacement for Barnley at the mission, having lost his two front teeth, he remarked "…it is a labor for me now to read the service."  They were active there for 40 years, translating prayerbook, gospels, hymnals into Cree and other native languages.  

Dec 16 – John La Farge  He was an artist who worked in stained glass, among other things.  He was the first to use opalescent glass in windows, and apparently introduced the method to Louis Tiffany.  The two were close at first, but their relationship soured – there is hint of a lawsuit between the two over patents.  And beyond that, his name rhymes with Lake Labarge, where “strange things were done in the midnight sun” – though there is no hint of his ever making a painting or a window of the event!  Of course it also rhymes with Madam Defarge – “knit one, purl two, repeat”!  Here’s an interesting looking book – What Would Madam Defarge Knit?

Dec 17  Dorothy L Sayers  She wrote crime novels!  She is also credited with the slogan “It pays to advertise.”  So why does the church take note of her?  She also wrote books and articles about the Christian faith.  The religious works of Sayers did so well at presenting the orthodox Anglican position that, in 1943, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, offered her a Lambeth doctorate in divinity, which she declined, explaining that “I have only served Divinity, as it were, accidentally, coming to it as a writer rather than as a Christian person.” They had an extensive correspondence, in which Temple tried to persuade her to accept a DD, and Sayers said she would see no problem about accepting a doctorate of letters. Temple concluded that he would mention this to others. In 1950, Sayers accepted an honorary degree of D. Litt. from the University of Durham.  She supported women’s rights, but claimed not to be a feminist.  She concluded one essay -

Indeed, it is my experience that both men and women are fundamentally human, and that there is very little mystery about either sex, except the exasperating mysteriousness of human beings in general...If you wish to preserve a free democracy, you must base it—not on classes and categories, for this will land you in the totalitarian State, where no one may act or think except as the member of a category. You must base it upon the individual Tom, Dick and Harry, on the individual Jack and Jill—in fact, upon you and me.

Dec 19  Lillian Trasher She was a missionary in Egypt – she started the first (Church?) orphanage in Egypt and is known as the Nile Mother of Egypt. After becoming engaged to marry minister Tom Jordan, Trasher heard a missionary from India speak. Deciding that her mission lay in Africa, she broke off the engagement ten days before the wedding after her prospective husband failed to share her call.  In 1910 after meeting Pastor Brelsford (or Perlsford) of Assiout, Egypt at a missionary conference, Trasher decided to defy her family's wishes and leave for that country. Inspired as well by opening a bible to Acts 7:34, which referred to Egypt, Lilian and her sister Jennie sailed to Africa with less than 100 dollars in their pockets.  Arriving in Assiout, (some 230 miles south of Cairo), she soon met a man who came to the mission house seeking someone to attend to a dying woman nearby. Lillian and an older woman named Sela went to see the woman, who died shortly after they arrived, but left them her malnourished baby girl, clinging to life. When they arrived, their Arabic translator told Miss Trasher that the old woman then holding the baby (its grandmother) planned to throw it into the great river Nile. At the thought of this Lillian Trasher could not leave the baby, whom she named Fareida. Thus she defied her then-mission organization and began an orphanage.

Some days from the world/earth calendar -

Dec 13

+ Wassily Kandinsky died in 1944, just three days short of his 78th birthday.  (See Dec 16th!)  He was a Russian, then French, painter.  One of the first to turn from natural subjects to abstraction.

Dec 14

+ I love this – in 1911, Roald Amundson reached the South Pole.  In 1958, the Soviets reached “the south pole of Inaccessibility” – the point on Antarctica that is farthest from the ocean.  Actually 546 miles from the geographical South Pole.

+ Sandy Hook School shooting in 2012.

+ John Harvey Kellogg died in 1943, speaking of names in the news!

Dec 15

+ The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.

+ James Naismith and his physical education class invented the game of basketball in Springfield, Mass., in 1891.  The score of the first game was 1-0!  They probably would not recognize the game today.

+ Sitting Bull was assassinated in 1890.  He was involved in the Sioux War of 1876-77 and the ghost Dance uprising of 1890.  After the Battle of Little BigHorn/Battle of Greasy Grass, he fled to Canada.  Promised amnesty, he returned, only to be killed in an attempt to arrest him.

+ Frederich Hundertwasser was born in 1928.  He was an Austrian visual artist and architect who also worked in the field of environmental protection.  He was “an opponent of the straight line” and any sort of standardization.  (He wore unmatched socks!)  He designed stamps for Cape Verde and for the United Nations postal administration in Geneva on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  In 1980, Hundertwasser visited Washington D.C. to support activist Ralph Nader's efforts to oppose nuclear proliferation. Mayor Marion Barry declared 18 November to be Hundertwasser Day as a result.   (Is it still, I wonder?)  Hundertwasser planted trees in Judiciary Square and advocated on behalf of a co-op apartment owner who was taken to court for installing a bay window.  He is best known for the Hundertwasserhaus.  We toured it and had a light lunch.  It was amazing.

Dec 16

+ Beethoven was born in 1770 (well, that’s a guess – he was baptized on Dec 17!), Jane Austin in 1775, Wassily Kandinsky in 1866.

+ Col Sanders died in 1980.  He went through a wide variety of jobs early in life, including running a successful ferry.  He ran a couple of gas stations, which did not do well.  In 1930, the Shell Oil Company offered Sanders a service station in North Corbin, Kentucky, rent free, in return for paying the company a percentage of sales.  Sanders began to serve chicken dishes and other meals such as country ham and steaks.  Initially he served the customers in his adjacent living quarters before opening a restaurant. It was during this period that Sanders was involved in a shootout with Matt Stewart, a local competitor, over the repainting of a sign directing traffic to his station. Stewart killed a Shell employee who was with Sanders and was convicted of murder, eliminating Sanders' competition.  Sanders was commissioned as a Kentucky colonel in 1935 by Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon. His local popularity grew, and, in 1939, food critic Duncan Hines visited Sanders's restaurant and included it in Adventures in Good Eating, his guide to restaurants throughout the US. The entry read:

Corbin, KY.   Sanders Court and Café

41 — Jct. with 25, 25 E. ½ Mi. N. of Corbin. Open all year except Xmas.

A very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies. Continuous 24-hour service. Sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham, hot biscuits. L. 50¢ to $1; D., 60¢ to $1

He established the Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, and later sold it but remained a spokesperson.  In later years he complained especially about the gravy.  “My God, that gravy is horrible. They buy tap water for 15 to 20 cents a thousand gallons and then they mix it with flour and starch and end up with pure wallpaper paste. And I know wallpaper paste, by God, because I've seen my mother make it. ... There's no nutrition in it and they ought not to be allowed to sell it. ... crispy recipe is nothing in the world but a damn fried doughball stuck on some chicken.”  Ok, but folks are sure lining up at the drive-thru window!

Dec 17

+ The first episode of The Simpsons aired in 1989.  I still have not seen any episode.

Dec 18

+ The first performance of The Nutcracker in 1892.  We saw the Minnesota Ballet version at the Rozsa Center a couple of weeks ago.  It was fun.

+ Charles Wesley was born in 1707.  He wrote many, many (like 6,500!) hymns, many of which we still sing today – including Hark the herald Angels Sing and Christ the Lord is Risen Today.  He and his brother John were responsible for the Methodist revival, although Charles was opposed to the idea of a breach with the Church of England.  (They were both C of E priests.)

+ the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution was proclaimed in 1865.  President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, effective on January 1, 1863, declared that the enslaved in Confederate-controlled areas were free. When they escaped to Union lines or federal forces advanced south, emancipation occurred without any compensation to the former owners. Texas was the last Confederate territory reached by the Union army. On June 19, 1865—Juneteenth—U.S. Army general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to proclaim the war had ended and so had slavery (in the Confederate states). In the slave-owning areas controlled by Union forces on January 1, 1863, state action was used to abolish slavery. The exceptions were Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery was finally ended by the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.

Dec 19

+ A Christmas Carol was published in 1843.  The first printing sold out by Christmas Eve.  By the end of 1844, thirteen editions had been published.  It has never been out of print.  But you saw the movie – you knew that already!  NPR did the Jonathan Winters reading this morning.  Dickens wrote four other Christmas stories - The Chimes (1844), The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Home (1845), The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848).

That’s what I got for now…..

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