New Saints / Christmas Day 2

"Good King Wenceslaus looked out, on the Feast of Stephen," goes the song. Today is that feast day. I overheard someone explaining that the tradition to which this song refers is this: that the well-off share of their Christmas leftovers with the poor the day after.

Not terribly morally uplifting.

I begin to remember that, in Christian scriptue, Stephen was a "deacon," a recent convert chosen shortly after the death of Jesus to help out by serving the widows and orphans, so that the "apostles" wouldn’t have to interrupt their preaching.

(Note: central to "following Jesus" was taking responsibility for people with needs. Good.)

(Though somehow the preachers got off the hook. Bad. Very bad, actually, for a young religion trying to find its way in a hypocritical world.)

Ironically, Stephen couldn’t keep focused on just serving others at the soup kitchen, and, when brought before the religious authorities in Jerusalem, enthusiastically told his version of "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon." For which he gets himself stoned. He's the first after Jesus to die for his belief.

Sadly, I never found him very compelling. The aggravating little (!) speech Luke composes for him in the Book of Acts, Chapter 6 & 7, would drive anyone, religious or not, batty. "Tell. Him. To. Shut. Up!"

Still, getting connected with the Stephen narrative and commemoration is a snap compared to finding a secular humanist calendar lists dates that might be more compelling to the less orthodox. When is Emerson’s Divinity School Address, or the Perseid meteor shower, or the discovery of Antarctica, or the birth of William Blake? Maybe secular humanists aren’t big believers in commemorations, or tying remembrances to the yearly calendar.

If true, I think this is a mistake.

While I certainly am bad at remembering birthdays, I do remember dates like October 4, Saint Francis, and July 24, Saint John. Marking your heros and your Waterloos by the days and the months helps me remember who I am as time passes on.

So, I scrabbled around online to find a calendar date-listing of progressives, humanists, workers and women who were filled with passion, courage and hope for their communities, sacrificing their own comfort, safety, even their lives to advance the cause of the poor and the innocent. Not easily found.

There’s a halfhearted attempt on the old UU worship site, but I can’t find anything similar on the new. What I was looking for, I realized when it came up on Google, is something more like the Syracuse Cultural Workers calendar which I used at Holden twelve years ago, unforgettable commemorations like Gandhi’s assassination (January 30, 1948) and King’s (April 4, Good Friday, 1968), the first use of atomic weapons (Hiroshima, August 3, 1945), Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), and so on.

These are people and events that stop you in your tracks, tighten your throat, open your heart, start your imagination, point your feet in new directions. Dates to live by, to swear to live differently because of.