On a recent Sunday in church, our priest quoted someone who once said, “Yesterday is the heaviest weight you can carry today.” He made sure to repeat the line for emphasis.As I let the quoted words settle, my mind wandered to my yesterday’s morning.
Jesus with gray hair? That’s not an image I’d ever imagined, not until my six-year-old granddaughter created one.
A few weeks ago it was “Poem in Your Pocket Day” at my kindergartener’s school. This is a day when each student is asked to bring a poem to school to share with her classmates.
Sometimes I get into a parenting funk. Or really, a life funk. One of those seasons when there are too many demands on time and energy, too many nights punctuated by sleepless children, too many ills in the world reminding us that the kingdom of God is still super not yet here.
Eleven years ago, Marvel took a huge risk. They attempted a blockbuster film about a beloved, though not strikingly popular superhero, starring an actor who was a troubled darling of small cinema in the middle of an upswing following imprisonment and rehab.
Welp, I turned into a priest-mom-Easter-morning-psycho.I mean, Christ is Risen, right? Might as well go crazy on your family.
Recently on a car ride, my four-year-old asked my ecologically-minded fifth grader and me the question, ‘Why do trees grow?’
This year I have two parental goals during Eastertide: Remember to teach the story of Easter and remember to celebrate Easter for its full fifty days.
On Palm Sunday, during the reading of the passion gospel, my three and a half year old learned that Jesus died. On the one hand, I was swelling with parental pride for his calm attentiveness and understanding of the story. But on the other hand, I was worried about how this new information would begin processing in his young mind.
Getting ready for Holy Week, I’m struck, as always, by how jarring the Palm Sunday liturgy is. One minute we’re all shouting “hosanna, hosanna!” (Greek for “save us”) and then the next thing we know, we’re shouting “Crucify him.” It’s emotionally wrenching; hope and expectation give way to fury and fear. No settling in, no probing depths. Our liturgy moves us from place to place, scarcely able to take a breath.