When I was a child at Saint Peter's School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, this was the worst week in the whole year. All of us knew how Jesus had entered Jerusalem on the back of a donkey on Palm Sunday and, by Friday, how He had been crucified. When you're a small kid, the 'but He rose from the dead and redeemed humanity' part of the Easter week observances sailed past you. Yes, you realized years later, it was the Passion and the Resurrection, much more so than the Virgin Birth, that made you a Christian and a Catholic, but when you're eight, all you're thinking about is the spikes driven through your outstretched palms. And how the same crowd who loved Him on Sunday could hate Him by Friday.
I used to wonder how many of us, and how often, felt about something that happened that we had really wanted only to learn after we had achieved it that it wasn't what we had hoped for. Just a moment ago, I was thinking about President Obama and any possible second thoughts on having been elected in November--that old 'if I had known then what I know now...' So often so many of us have lives paved with regrets of what might have been.
This year Palm Sunday comes at a point in the calendar where any form of a respite is welcome. Maybe it's just me, but probably not-it's been a long and hard winter. Things have been going south for some time now at the personal, professional, medical and philosophical level though in recent weeks, at least medically, I've had a very successful knee replacement surgery so that's a reason to be cheerful. I think all of us who had thought we were putting away a little something every paycheck for 'that next adventure' got some pretty unpleasant bumps and bruises by the time all the spinning wheels and flashing lights had ceased and desisted. Remember that parlor game 'The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon'?--a lot of us got to play with that with Bernie Madoff and a whole busload of gray-suited grafters. And AIG became the first four letter word that was actually a three letter acronym.
This might be the week we can all learn something from the New Testament-whether you are Child of the Book or not. Not just in our nation, or region, or state or city, but actually like a pandemic, spreading across the globe and around the world, depression and despair are clouding the horizon and changing (and not for the better) the lives of millions and billions of our fellow travelers.
It's so easy to mourn what we've lost or no longer have or will never again possess. It's harder to turn the ball cap inside out and put it back on our head, step back into the batter's box, square our shoulders and wait on the next pitch, especially since we've been dusted a couple of times so far by this pitcher. We watched the bottom fall out of the stock market, our unemployment rate climb, our manufacturing infrastructure resemble a Nerf vibrator, and our banking industry evaporate. And many of us had it good--for the majority of the planet, not as well off as we were, all of the calamity and chaos have made an intolerable situation even more so.
But look around--maybe not too much farther north than here in Norwich, Connecticut, but the trees have a vague and soft red glow on their branch tips--something's getting ready to happen. There's crocuses coming up and more birds than we've seen in months. The days are getting longer, not just feeling longer. Yeah, we've got a boxcar of worry to manage--but we have these clever little thumbs and huge brains to help us wrestle this stuff to a standstill. And, for those of us who can read, we know because we've seen the records of the past, we've had all of this happen before. Maybe not in our lifetimes--but in those of our parents and grandparents.
The sun came up this morning, as it has for no one knows how many years, and will, in all likelihood, come up again tomorrow. The same folks who were lining the streets to welcome the Next Big Thing have gone home, but that doesn't mean we have to leave or content ourselves with what might have been. We're a species that dusts itself off and gets back in the race because we don't know how to NOT do that, so square those shoulders, and dig in a little bit and sit dead on red. We don't need to hit homers--right now, we need to get a couple of guys on base and play small ball. Here, put this cap on-it ain't over by a long shot.
-bill kenny
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