Trail's End Week 12 2021

Remember your humanity and forget the rest

(Albert Einstein)

On Saturday evening I attended the Pesach Seder at the home of my son-in-law's family. It has been an annual tradition to attend the Seder dinner with college friends of ours who I am missing deeply right now, so it was really wonderful to have an invitation in our new home. I really love some of the Jewish traditions that I have come to know through our friends, and I think that is because they remind me so much of some of the Catholic/Episcopal traditions I grew up learning. Tradition, which I so vehemently eschewed in my adolescence and young adulthood, has now become a place to feel tethered in life. All this moving around and learning new social rules over the past year has made the floating through life a little too free. I am ready for the tethering that comes with feeling settled; a small dinner party on the Pesach Seder was just what I needed for grounding.

As we went around the table sharing the readings of Passover, I was so affected by the rhythm of time. Here is the gist of Passover as I understand it ~ a celebration of The Exodus, the freedom from slavery of the Israelites from Ancient Egypt that followed the Ten Plagues. There was so much in the readings that resonated with today. By calling out the injustices perpetrated against the Israelites, Passover encourages us to understand that our lives are not about sloughing off responsibilities. Service to God, to one another and to what is best in ourselves — those are freedoms. They enable us to maximize the capacities of our own souls. Whether or not one believes in God, I took the messages of Passover to be so similar to the teachings of Jesus Christ, all of which is summed up for me in Albert Einstein's famous quote. We are all in this together so let's all be in this together.

And about the rhythms of time. In reading aloud from the Passover guide you could have substituted Donald Trump for the Egyptians; Black Americans for the Israelites. You could swap out Capitalism for the Egyptians and humans living in poverty for the Israelites. And on and on. There is such a force for good in the world and such a force for evil, and it seems that time after time after time we continue the ongoing search for our humanity. Even though it seems like such a Sisyphean task, what else can we do? In this binary world we can choose the light side or the dark side; straddling is only an option for the ostrich.

So...in choosing the light side it seems so important to notice what is good in the world as often as possible to balance out the suffering. Good friends who live so far away. Children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters. Cherry blossoms on the trees following a hard winter. Vaccines. Even cicadas that come out of the ground every 17 years reminding us of the balance of ecology.

Next week-end I will celebrate Easter, the holiday that my family tradition hailed as hopeful. Easter is rebirth. Traditional Easter flowers include Easter Lilies, which are believed to have grown in the Garden of Gethsemane, the site of Jesus's arrest. Beauty to behold in a place of consequential injustice. Usually we celebrate Easter at the home of a childhood friend. Her mother used to host Easter every year when I was a young girl and now she has taken over for her mother. I have been celebrating with them almost every year for 60 years. This year we will start our new tradition of celebrating with our granddaughter, son, daughter-in-law and her parents. We will mix some of our traditions (broccoli casserole for brunch) with their traditions (lamb for dinner) and we will honor this holiday of hope with such a bittersweetness for the loss of the old and the anticipation of the new. All the while moving through one step at a time tethered to the importance of our common humanity.

May the season of Spring, Pesach and Easter bring your family the blessings of love and hope.

The view from our bedroom window this morning