Reflecting

I am sitting in a bakery, sipping a vanilla caramel hazelnut latte, watching the people, feeling the sun, and thinking about the week.

This is holy week.  Of major importance to Jews and Christians.  Passover began on Monday and Christians of all denominations are engaging in rituals leading up to Sunday.

In all this, I started to think about the events that led to this week.

Last week, the weather was up and down and it was spring break for my children.  Last week, elected officials were hurling insults and trying to deny health coverage to children.  Last week, tea party protestors were calling elected officials every racial and homophobic epithet you could imagine.  Last week felt like alot of hate was in the air.

Some of those same self-proclaimed voices for the unborn, adherents to conservative doctrine, proponents of a faith-based country were definitely not acting like Jesus.  Now this week, you bet you can find some of them in their church pews, dressed in their piety, reflecting on Jesus, and feeling smug in their rightness.

And it bothers me.  It bothers some of the young teens who were engaged in religious discussions yesterday on Facebook.  It makes them wonder, question, wonder what this is all about if politics becomes intertwined in religion and none of it seems clear.

I also ponder during this week because spring represents renewal and rejuvenation, a time to shed the heaviness and dreariness of a stifling winter to put on the light and whimsy of a carefree spring.  It is a feeling of fresh and fun and possible.

It is also the week I reflect on the life of my first-born son.  Cory would have been twenty-eight on Thursday.  The days leading up to it I close my eyes and remember my hopeful and naive self as his body was bulging inside my toothpick thin frame.  I carry his memory on.

It is in reflecting about him and life and the heatlhcare and the pundits and the politicians that I made myself stop and step away, to not turn on the news, to not pollute my heart with the evil that was flashing before my eyes.  Not now, not this week.

It is holy week, let us stop for a moment and remember the least of these.  To honor the tenents of most major faiths, to love one another and seek the greater good. To ignore the polls and ratings and put aside greed.  Life is what we have before us, a great gift and people are the present.