Happy Easter, my friends! To me, Easter symbolizes life. Plants and trees, along with the birth in the animal world. My wish for you and your family would be the renewal of life, love, and happiness.
For Christians and Jews, all of our religious holidays divide us except for Passover and Easter. Passover and Easter divide us by bringing us closer together.
Passover and Easter are different in that Passover, as theologian Martin Buber has written, is celebrated by a meal eaten for God, while Easter is celebrated by a meal eaten of God.
Passover celebrates a God who could not become visible, while Easter celebrates a God who had to become visible to save a sinful humanity. Passover is about liberation for a nation of slaves. Easter is about liberation of individual believers from the enslavement of sin.
There are worlds of difference between these two faiths, and as much as we wish to come together, our sacred histories do keep us apart. However, we've only kept apart the way singers in different parts of the same choir are kept apart by the timber of their voices. We're kept apart the way climbers are kept apart by their choices to climb the same mountain by different paths. Passover and Easter teach us that the ways we're different, though real and defining, are not nearly as important as the ways we're all the same. Let me pray this truth now. Just as God reached into every Hebrew home during Passover, then as now, so God reached out into every Christian heart during Easter, then as now.source
Easter is also about those Easter eggs we do every year. One year sparkly eggs, one year tie dye, and one year they were just bold colors. The sky is the limit, although when they were younger if it was too complicated, I got to finish them while the kids watched with glazed-over eyeballs. Parenting was such a crapshoot. No matter what you did, you could guarantee it was the wrong thing. Murphys Law and all that. We were on a first-name basis.
The kids really got the hang of tie dyes the very first year. The eggs were fun when we did them and we keep migrating back to them, although last year we felt the need for a little sparkle, so we did ones that involved glitter.
Growing up, there were a lot of Easter lilies or white tulips for Easter and an Easter bonnet. Shoot me, I'm Catholic and we loved this tradition. Until we didn't, but, that came much later when we were teens and knew everything. Oh, yes. I even knew better. But, that is a story for another post.
Oh, yes. The baskets. I cannot forget that. And honestly, I wouldn't want to. Happy Happy Easter! :)
All I have are my words, armed in my mind, written in pen, stand by stand. Oh, yes. Still by hand. It has a different feel. Altered not by keys, backspace, and delete, I write, erase, tear it to pieces and start all over again. And again.
Thank you for visiting my post 馃挅 Don't ever forget what a wonderful world we live in, people.Kindness counts. Wherever you go, whatever you do.
Shall I compare thee to a summer鈥檚 day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer鈥檚 lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature鈥檚 changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow鈥檚t,
Nor shall death brag thou wander鈥檚t in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow鈥檚t,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shakespeare