The Date of June 19th
The Rt. Rev. Brian W. Keith
W
e like dates. We like to pin events to a specific day of the year and then
remember or celebrate them in future years. It is a powerful reminder
of an important event in our personal, national or religious lives. And it can
lead us to reflect and appreciate the values or meaning we have connected
with that date. On a personal level, birthdays are happy occasions for families
and friends joining together.1 Married couples celebrate anniversary dates
annually.
On a national level, most countries commemorate the date of their
founding, or the beginning or ending of major wars. On a religious level,
Christmas is anchored to December 25th. And even though Easter and Palm
Sunday move around, they are based on specific dates on a calendar.
Had it not been for the “note” toward the end of the True Christian Religion
(# 791) about the Lord sending out the twelve disciples throughout the spiritual
world, proclaiming “the Lord God Jesus Christ reigns, whose kingdom shall be
for ever and ever” on June 19th, 1770, we might have found it difficult to settle
on any day of the year on which to peg the founding of the New Church.
One approach might have been to determine when the Lord appeared to
1 Some cultures do not commemorate the day of one’s birth. We were surprised when members of
the Maasai tribe in Kenya started joining the General Church and all listed their birth date as January 1.
We have since discovered that even to this day most Maasai only keep track of seasons, not days of the
year nor the years themselves. A person might know he or she was born in the year of a great flood or
an unusual storm, but nothing else. Thus they have to adapt to our mapping of time, and make their best
guess to satisfy our system. So they pick the first day of the approximate year in which they were born.
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