Dying, Rising: Easter Weekend

Dear Gentle Readers,

I will be slow to post here through Easter, since Steve and I have taken a small and much-needed break/retreat these days.  A longtime friend of ours turned 60 this year, and we had promised to visit him and celebrate his 60th birthday at Easter time.  

Meanwhile, please keep us in mind, if you will.  We continue to live through our own tiny version of the paschal mystery with the family turmoil about which I blogged some days ago, which remains sharp and very painful for us.  It puzzles us that some people's understanding of religious truth depends on nullifying other human beings, even their own family members, when those family members don't fit the narrow boundaries of what is called truth.  

More interesting, and more appropriate to the paschal mystery, it seems to us, to keep expanding the horizons of what we call truth until everyone is included and affirmed--because all of us come from the hands of the same loving God.  Who may be very unlike the God we imagine as we cling to our tiny notions of truth--something we will perhaps see with clearer eyes when we meet Her at the end of our lives.

There is also rising amidst the dying, with some profoundly moving statements of support coming to us out of the blue from some loved ones we don't know well, and on whose love we hadn't really counted.  And that means the world to us--especially to Steve, for whom these are existential and spiritual struggles that involve questions about his worth in the human family and his place in the scheme of things.  And for me vicariously, since I love him and am joined to him by love.

The video is, as many readers will already know, Mercedes Sosa singing Violeta Parra's magnificent poem "Gracias a la Vida": for me, an Easter song.  And I hope for readers of Bilgrimage, too.