Christmas Every Day

1929 Birth of Martin Luther King, Jr.

The son of a prominent Atlanta, Georgia pastor, King (1929-68)  attended segregated public schools and went on to study theology, receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 1955. As a pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama and a member of the executive committee of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he took a leadership role in the famous bus boycott provoked by the actions of Rosa Parks. During the struggle, King was arrested and his home was bombed but victory was eventually won; blacks and whites would henceforth ride the buses as equals.

In 1957 King was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization pressing for increased civil rights through an application of religious principles, especially nonviolent protest. He grew in fame and moral stature as he led marches in Selma, Alabama where young black people encountered the firehoses and police dogs; in Birmingham he was arrested, which inspired his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In the March on Washington, he delivered his  “l Have a Dream” speech to a quarter-million people. In 1964, at the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., became the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize.

With the passage of the landmark civil rights bills of the mid-1960s, King turned his attention to protesting American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war and economic inequality. These stands lost King a good deal of white support while more radical black leaders, rejecting non-violence, seemed to be gaining in popularity amongst African American youth. In April 1968 he appeared in Memphis Tennessee to lend his support to a strike by garbage workers. His speech on April 3 was eerily prophetic:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

The next day, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, he was assassinated.

1753 Death of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne

Berkeley (1685-1753) was an Anglo-Irish pilosopher and churchman, best known for his 1710 work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Understanding in which he argued that nothing existed unless it was perceived. His later years were spent, as Chambers’ Book of Days explains, in touting the virtues of pine tar.

Berkeley was a poet, as well as a mathematician and philosopher; and his mind was not only well stored with professional and philosophical learning, but with information upon trade, agriculture, and the common arts of life.  Having received benefit from the use of tar-water, when ill of the colic, he published a work on the Virtues of Tar-water, on which he said he had bestowed more pains than on any other of his productions. His last work, published but a few mouths before his death, was Further Thoughts on Tar-water; and it shows his enthusiastic character, that, when accused of fancying he had discovered a panacea in tar-water, he replied, that to speak out, he freely owns he suspects tar-water is a panacea.’ Walpole has taken the trouble to preserve, from the newspapers of the day, the following epigram on Berkeley’s tar-water:

Who dare deride what pious Cloyne has done?
The Church shall rise and vindicate her son;
She tells is all her bishops shepards are,
And Shepherds heal their rotten sheep with tar’

In a letter written by Mr. John Whishaw, solicitor, May 25^th, 1744, we find this account of Berkeley’s panacea: 

“The Bishop of Cloyne, in Ireland, has published a book, of two shillings price, upon the excellencies of tar-water, which is to keep ye bloud in due order, and a great remedy in many cases. His way of making it is to put, I think a gallon of water to a quart of tar, and after stirring it together. to let it stand forty-eight hours, and then pour off the clear and drink a glass of about half a pint in ye mornn, and as much at five in ye afternoon. So it’s become common to call for a glass of tar-water in a coffee-house, as a dish of tea or coffee.’

1645

The death of an archbishop.

William Laud (1573-1645) was an English churchman during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I, a time when Anglicanism was being defined and when ecclesiastical issues were literally matters of life and death.

Under Elizabeth the Church of England sought a religious via media, with a Protestant theology mated with the rule of bishops and an ornate ceremonial. It was opposed by Catholics who sought a return to Rome and by Puritans who wished to purge the “popish dregs” of ceremony and episcopacy. In 1605 the attempt by Catholic conspirators to murder the entire royal family, political class and church leadership in the Gunpowder Plot convinced most Englishmen that Catholicism meant foreign tyranny and that Protestantism meant patriotism.

The latter belief became problematic when King Charles I married a Catholic French princess and covertly allowed Catholic clergy at court. The problem was exacerbated when Charles nominated William Laud to be, first, Bishop of London (1628) and then Archbishop of Canterbury (1633). Through church courts, Laud enforced a novel theology on Anglicanism, his version of Arminianism which challenged some long-held doctrines and imposed a very Catholic-looking ceremonial, and drove out Puritan leaning preachers and professors. His persecution of the dissident writer William Prynne, who was sentenced to judicial mutilation and imprisonment, was very unpopular. Prynne had been branded on the forehead with the letters “SL”, meaning “seditious libel” but which the victim claimed really represented “Stigmata Laudis” — “the marks of Laud”. By 1640 anger between the royal party and large sections of public and political opinion were at a boiling point.

After years of trying to rule on his own Charles was obliged to call Parliament which called for the arrests of the king’s chief advisors, Laud and William Wentworth. Wentworth went to the block in 1641 but Laud’s trial was delayed. He was accused of bribery, attempting to impose a tyranny, sponsoring Catholic influence, undermining Parliament and having “treacherously endeavoured to subvert the Fundamental Laws of this Realm; and to that end hath in like manner endeavoured to advance the Power of the Council-Table, the Canons of the Church, and the King’s Prerogative, above the Laws and Statutes of the Realm”. Laud was executed on this day in 1645.

Laud was exactly the wrong man for the high positions he held at the time he was appointed to them; aggressive and intolerant, he helped create the crisis that led to the English Civil War and the execution of himself and the king he served.

It is St Fillan’s Day. Fillan was an 8th-century Scottish saint,  known for his piety and good works. He spent a considerable part of his holy life at a monastery which he built in Pittenweem. While engaged here in transcribing the Scriptures, his left hand sent forth sufficient light to enable him, at night, to continue his work without a lamp. For the sake of seclusion, he finally retired to a wild and lonely vale, called from him Strathfillan, in Perthshire, where he died, and where his name is still attached to the ruins of a chapel, to a pool, and a bed of rock.

The uses to which the locale was put tell us much about the treatment of mental illness in Medieval Scotland: At Strathfillan, there is a deep pool, called the Holy Pool, where, in olden times, they were wont to dip insane people. The ceremony was performed after sunset on the first day of the quarter, and before sunrise next morning. The dipped persons were instructed to take three stones from the bottom of the pool, and, walking three times round each of three cairns on the bank, throw a stone into each. They were next conveyed to the ruins of St. Fillan’s chapel; and in a corner called St. Fillan’s bed, they were laid on their back, and left tied all night. If next morning they were found loose, the cure was deemed perfect, and thanks returned to the saint. The pool was visited  in the nineteenth century, not by parishioners, who had no faith in its virtue, but by people from other and distant places.

2009

Richard John Neuhaus dies.

Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009) was in his time a Canadian, an American, a liberal civil rights advocate, Lutheran priest, Catholic priest, magazine editor, conservative presidential advisor, and fierce defender of the role of religion in public life.

Born in Pembroke, Ontario, he moved with his family to the United States where he became, like his father, a Lutheran pastor. In the 1960s he became an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam and marched with Martin Luther King in demanding greater rights for racial minorities. Neuhaus’s life took a different direction after the 1973 “Roe v Wade” Supreme Court decision on abortion; growing more conservative he sought to create a united voice for Christianity in social and political matters. He helped found the journal  First Things, where Protestant, Catholic and Jewish thinkers could “advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society” and wrote or edited influential books such as The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, Guaranteeing the Good Life: Medicine and the Return of Eugenics and American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. With Chuck Colson he produced Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission. In 1990 he joined the Roman Catholic Church and in the next year he was ordained into the priesthood. Few have done as much to bring religious thinking to bear in the public square.

On the question of absolute truth and religious tolerance he proposed “Neuhaus’s Law”, which states, “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”