A week of prophets, messiah's and great teachers

Moses, Buddha, Christ, my kids....I wrote to a friend this evening...Parenting, I am pretty sure, is the answer to everything, if you are willing to be open and humble and inquisitive and generous. My kids have taught me every worthwhile thing about the world I know. There are many things they have also tried to teach me that I haven't learned yet. My job is to pay better attention

Today I learned that the story of raising Lazarus from the dead is really cool to a Unitarian-Jewish-Buddhist-Christian four-year-old. I also learned that Handel's Messiah is as fun to share with a child as it is to discover for yourself. Handel, in his genius, used very short passages from the Bible for his libretto and the musical energy is so joyful, it's intoxicating.

Is all of this religion confusing to Satya, my mother asks. No, she doesn't miss a beat. She puts Christ in heaven, Buddha in Nirvana, Moses on the mountaintop, and sees no reason they can't all exist that way. After all, don't I always tell her every body is different? Why shouldn't their gods and beliefs be?

The only thing she is confused about is how to get Bush out of office and why he got there in the first place. There is a song late in the Messiah that borrows its text from Psalm 2: "

Why do the nations so furiously rage together? [and] why do the people imagine a vain thing?

The kings of the earth rise up, and the rulers take consel together against the Lord, and against His Annointed.

Seeing those words today gave me hope that we may,

break their bonds asunder, and cast away their yokes from us.

I seldom quote scripture. But there are no atheists in a foxhole, right?

On that note, I'll sign off. It's 11:20 and I've just finished making the kids' Easter basket and a cake for Easter dinner tomorrow. We had Passover and my birthday this week, too. I am not sure when we slow down again, but I, at least am going to stop for the next six hours...Ok, at least slow down.