Happy Easter Weekend

I wrote this last year and I am resurrecting it here.

It's everything I love about The Burrow - family, deep thoughts, and a smile

Happy Day Off From Work to those observing Good Friday (by choice or executive fiat).

Happy Easter to those who believe,

to those who like getting dressed in frilly finery,

to those with great hats,

and to those thinking deep thoughts.

*****

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At an early age, Big Cuter wanted to know why that guy has a towel and nails through his hands when we were confronted with Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion at the Art Institute of Chicago. His query highlighted the central problem I had with teaching the Cuters about Easter.  I was stuck between bunnies and lambs and a crucifixion. 

Nannie was eager to help, but she, too, was flummoxed.The bookstores didn't offer much.  Their descriptions of the Last Supper and The Passion and The Resurrection were either glossed over or overly grotesque for a sensitive, half-Christian, half-Jewish, little boy.  

We decided to stick with the bunnies and rebirth.  It was spring, after all.

Passover presented some of the same issues.  Why did God want to kill little boys, my own son wondered. Walk softly and carry a big stick came to mind as an answer, but it wouldn't do much to assuage his worry.  He was, after all, a first born son.  We wondered about a merciful God, about a righteous God, about a jealous God before the soup was served.  

I didn't worry about those issues when I was a child.  I thought it was weird that someone could die and be reborn, but if my Catholic girlfriend thought it was true, then who was I to argue?  Weird worked through elementary school.  

By the time I was in high school, I was doubting the whole religion thing in general, and was able to ascribe my problems with the stories to a problem with mythology in general.  I didn't give the Bible more credence than Edith Hamilton's Mythology.

Now there's FlapJilly and I'm faced with the same dilemma.  I asked her other grandmother, a Christian of many perspectives, if she had any ideas, but, sadly, MOTG was as lost last year as were Nannie and I, decades ago.

Once again, there were those bunnies.

Is that what faith is all about?  Believing that which is awkward because God is somehow involved?  If I had faith, perhaps I would know the answer.  But, I don't.  

So I am left with eating unleavened bread as I contemplate the Resurrection.  I wonder if the disciple to Jesus's right in The Last Supper really was Mary Magdalene.  I posit interesting tides and the parting of the Red Sea.  I dip my pinky in a wine glass and recount the ten plagues visited upon Egypt, and then I wash them off the plate and eat dinner.

It's not exactly what Sunday School or Hebrew School hoped for, but it's all I've got at the moment.

I'll celebrate by planting more pink and white  blossoms in my containers.  I'll watch the leaves appear from the bulbs planted years ago, and I'll concentrate on rebirth and miracles.  

And I'll try not to be angry at the bunnies eating the petunias.  It's their holiday, after all.