It's Good Friday, which meant an extensive conversation with my eight year old last night about why there's no school today. I honestly don't get it, either, considering the whole separation of church and state thing. I mean, I get why Good Friday is one of the most important days in the Christian calendar. And I suppose in communities where most of the students and faculty would take it off as a religious holiday it is more cost effective to close the schools, but that's not necessarily the case where we live.
But that's not why I'm writing. Although both my spouse and I were raised Episcopalian, neither of us are church goers now (other than Christmas and Easter, out of respect for my parents, with whom we attend church). The reasons are long and complex, ranging from Sunday being on the only morning we don't have to rush out the door somewhere so we're loathe to give that up, to not being really sure of what we want out of organized religion. But again, that's a whole other post that I'm not sure I'll ever be too interested in writing.
My conversation with my child focused on why Good Friday was important to those who believed in what Good Friday meant. We talked about the Easter story, the Bible, the man known as Jesus for whom many consider a savior.
But we also talked about the idea of interconnectedness; how each living being has an energy (some call this a spirit or a soul), and how all those energies influence all the others. Some call the keeper of this energy God. Some call it the Great Spirit. Some call it Karma. Being eight, and thus deeply concerned about justice and fairness, she really liked Karma. We've talked about it before in the "don't pick on your brother because putting that sort of vibe out there only invites reciprocity" (and yes, I use words like reciprocity with my eight year old because that's how she'll learn them), but this was different. This conversation was more about spring, rebirth, renewal, and how Good Friday is a reminder that we all embody a power that should be directed into a life that seeks goodness and kindness and all the other virtues that strengthen the greater spirit that connects us all.
It helps that today is warm and sunny after a March of record rainfall and unprecedented local flooding. And it really helped to walk out of my house to see a ticket on the car parked illegally on my street for a week, in my spot, even after the owner sweetly promised he'd only be there a day and would move and understood that there was designated parking. I had all sorts of mean thoughts every time I saw that car. I wanted to let the air out of the tires. I wanted to bribe a towing service to take the car away. I wanted to get the neighbors to park bumper to bumper so that car had no hope of getting out of the spot even when it wanted to. But ultimately, that's not the kind of person I want to be in the world. So I bitched about it. I visualized the house I want to move to that has a driveway. I let it be.
And Karma took over. Good Friday, indeed.
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