Thirty one years ago as of yesterday, Debra and I went to the hospital in Rhode Island, getting there at around 10:30 AM. A little while after noon, I said I’d go to the cafeteria to get some French fries. When I came back, our son Davey had already decided that he wasn’t going to wait any longer, and sure enough, he was born at 1:20 PM, giving us our Word of the Week, birthday, a word that I think everybody likes. But boy, that was quick! And by the way, that year we got a ton of snow, so I had to shovel out the driveway day after day to keep things clear, but since we lived then in a small house in Providence, and since that snow had to go somewhere, I ended up heaving it over the fence into our small back yard, and that meant that we got the greatest snow-fort in the world, five feet high and about seven feet square. “It’s a boy!” we laughed, though we were pretty sure of that beforehand.
As long as there have been calendars, there have been birthday celebrations. The followers of the ancient philosopher Epicurus, who was actually a modest fellow and not a pursuer of heady pleasures, used to celebrate his birthday every year. I believe they actually began to do that while he was still alive. Georg Friedrich Handel was born in 1685 on the same day as Davey, which is a fitting thing, seeing as Davey plays the church organ, such as today (Sunday) as I’m writing this. I still remember when Washington’s Birthday (February 22 in the “new calendar,” that is, the calendar approved by Gregory XIII, to make up for the slightly too short Julian calendar year) was a holiday, and, with a bit less of celebration, Lincoln’s Birthday. That was before they both got folded into Presidents’ Day, which I don’t really care for. A bit of trivia here: the first time a politician appeared on an American coin, rather than a representation of Miss Liberty or sometimes an Indian chief as Mr. Liberty, was a sort of birthday memorial — Lincoln’s centennial, in 1909. That was followed soon by Washington’s bicentennial in 1932. I’m not sure why Jefferson got onto the nickel in 1938, or Franklin on the half dollar in 1948.
The ancient Christians celebrated birthdays in two new ways. One, that has to do with Christ’s entering into our world in the flesh, I’ll talk about when March 25 comes around. The other is the one that most people are familiar with: they celebrated the day when a holy person was really born, the day on which he or she was welcomed into the life of life. They had the greater impetus to do that, seeing that so many of the great saints of old died by persecution; so what had been intended to shame them, they took as days of glory. A fallen gladiator in the arena might be an object of pity or ridicule, but otherwise nobody took any notice of the poor fellow. But an old man, a boy, a young woman hardly more than a girl, a mother with her children, a young man in his prime, standing tall and patient and undismayed — even their most dogged persecutors couldn’t laugh at that for very long. And in fact, February 23 is the day when, in 155 A.D. or a year or two later, Saint Polycarp was put to death in Smyrna, as a very old man, one who had sat at the feet of the elderly apostle John. The proconsul gave him a chance to avoid the fire and the stake. All he had to do was to deny Jesus. “I have served him for 86 years,” said Polycarp, “and he has never done me wrong. Why should I blaspheme him now?” For him it was a day of joy.
My dog Molly remembers things. She remembers people, how they look and smell and sound and behave. Man does more: he memorializes, he commits things to memory, he invests the memory with significance, or we might say he sees the very real significance of a thing — such as the birth of a little boy into this world — and he raises it up so that it does not simply float down the river of time. That kind of human memory is a foretaste of eternity. Well then for us that we celebrate a birthday with lights and flame! And I see old pictures of myself and my cousins and aunts and uncles at one of the kids’ birthday parties, and the truth is brought home to me, that these human things have not passed away.
It’s clear that the word has two parts to it, birth and day. Here’s something that might surprise you: English day is totally unrelated to Latin dies, Spanish dia, Italian giorno (from Latin diurnus, daily). We don’t really know where Anglo-Saxon daeg comes from. Those Romance language words are related to English Tuesday, but only to the Tues part of it: it was Tiw’s day, to render it into modern English, Tiw being a Germanic sky god. We do know about birth. It’s the verb beran (modern English bear), with the suffix -th added to make it into a noun. Think of steal, stealth; heal, health; till, tilth; die, death. That bear comes from an ancient root that shows up all over the Indo-European map, having to do with carrying things or taking them somewhere. Germanic b is the cousin of Latin f, so we have English ferry, from Latin through Old French, for the boat that bears you over the river, and dozens of other words too, like refer, which means to carry something backward. It’s also the cousin of Greek ph-, so we have the name Christopher, for the man who unwittingly carried Christ across the river: he’s the Christ-bearer. But in reality it is Christ, the true and only Atlas, who bears the world on his shoulders.
A blessed and happy birthday to all our friends here at Word and Song who were born yesterday or today!
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