Sojourner Truth (above), the former slave, abolitionist and campaigner for women’s rights, died today in 1883. At the age of nine, she was sold along with a flock of sheep for $100. It was another 20 years before she escaped to freedom, along with her daughter. She became a Methodist and then a travelling preacher, speaking about abolition, women’s rights, and prison reform. Widely celebrated in her lifetime, she has been listed as one of the 100 most significant Americans of all time.
‘That little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Jesus Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.’ Sojourner Truth, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ speech, 1851
Today in 1922, at the entrance to a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt, sealed some 3,000 years before, the Egyptologist Howard Carter chipped away at the doorway to see what lay inside. Lord Carnarvon, his sponsor, was at his side. ‘Can you see anything?’ he asked. Carter famously replied: ‘Yes, wonderful things!’ The tomb belonged to the Pharaoh Tutankhamun, and the treasure which emerged from it stunned the world.
William Cowper, the English poet and hymnwriter, was born today in 1731. Admired for his poetry by Coleridge and Wordsworth, Cowper wrote hymns still sung today, including ‘God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform’. He also wrote an abolitionist poem, ‘The Negro’s Complaint’, which was often quoted by Martin Luther King Jr in the 1960s.
Is there, as ye sometimes tell us,
Is there one who reigns on high?
Has he bid you buy and sell us,
Speaking from his throne the sky?
William Cowper, ‘The Negro’s Complaint’
Today is the feast of Gregory of Sinai, a 12th-13th century monk who was kidnapped as a boy by Muslim raiders and whose life revolved around three monasteries. At St Catherine’s in Sinai, he was a cook, a baker and a manuscript writer, and learned the ascetic disciplines. On Mt Athos in Greece, he entered into prayer of the heart, using the Jesus Prayer – ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me’ – and helped establish Mt Athos as a place of hesychast (‘stillness’) spirituality. Finally, he established a monastic community on the Black Sea in Bulgaria, where he trained the spiritual leaders of the next generation, and where he died in 1346.
‘I have learnt from experience that unless a monk cultivates the following virtues he will never make progress: fasting, self-control, keeping vigil, patient endurance, courage, stillness, prayer, silence, inward grief and humility. These virtues generate and protect each other.’ Gregory of Sinai, ‘On Stillness’
Blamegiving Day, an atheist parody of Thanksgiving, was celebrated by bad-tempered unbelievers in New York City today in 1931. The day was organised by the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, which wanted to get furious at God while simultaneously denying his existence. The atheists who attended sang a mock hymn and took part in a church-not-church service, and then presumably went home to their families for the remainder of Thanksgiving.
Blame God from whom all cyclones blow,
Blame him when rivers overflow,
Blame him who swirls down house and steeple,
Who sinks the ship and drowns the people.
Blamegiving Day hymn, 1931