Easter 2026: Sunday musings…4/5/2026
1) Joselyn. As in “Joselyn and the Sweet Compression”, a funk/soul band fronted by Joselyn, a powerhouse voice capable of handling everything from Whitney to Keith. No kidding. She crushed a couple of Whitney Houston songs and then just knocked “War” by the Stones out of the park.
Do yourself a favor and check them out on YouTube. And if they ever get near your town check them out. You’re welcome.
2) Riesling. Wine and food pairings are a fun undertaking. Beth and I have played around with the topic for some 40 years now. Some pairings are simply classic and bare no trifling. Think Filet of Sole and Chablis. Others remain mysterious and resist all efforts to make a match, usually around a Holiday in my experience. Case in point: roast turkey. Not unlike a medical problem that has 10 or 20 different solutions, all of which have ardent supporters, which means that there really isn’t a solution to the problem.
I mean, no one can even make the “red vs. white” call on turkey.
The Easter ham felt the same for me. It’s the salt. I tried everything. White wines of all types. Rosé. Heavy reds like cabernet sauvignon or zinfandel, light reds from any and all countries. But I think I finally nailed it: dry Riesling. From anywhere. It just works.
You’re still welcome.
3. Free-Range. As in free-range children. Apparently there was a guest editorial in the NYT on March 22nd by Sara Wildman about the free-range childhood experience enjoyed by the boys in Rob Reiner’s film “Stand by Me”(no idea who she is or why she was invited to write the piece). The movie takes place in the era in which I grew up. During summers, weekends and vacations, my siblings and our friends were evicted from our homes shortly after breakfast each morning. We exited into the wild with instructions to return at the sound of the “dinner bell”, on our own for lunch.
Suburban kids, all, our bikes gave us the run of the town.
Today in the Sunday NYT a number of letter writers chime in with declarations that our ’60’s and ’70’s childhoods were some version of the best childhood one could have. Not sure about that, of course. It’s tough to make a call on that since I was too busy having a pretty good childhood to be too terribly introspective about the experience. I suppose there was stress and anxiety, but honestly it all seemed to be solvable with a quick fistfight (no injuries) or an ice cream cone.
It’s a fascinating topic, one that I think I will spend a bit more time on in a future “musing…”
4) Competition. Some years ago a Jewish friend posted a very funny video of Jon Stewart of the Daily Show beseeching his fellow Jews to “step it up” in the battle between Easter and Passover for the hearts and minds of children. Look for it. It’s just full of funny lines. For example, Stewart laments that Christians can count on luminaries such as (former) NFL quarterback Tim Tebow to spread the word, while there has yet to be a superstar Jewish NFL quarterback. As an aside, raised as a Catholic, I would reply that Mr. Stewart’s people are killing it in the comedy realm vs. Christians, but you get the idea. He lays down his trump card right at the beginning: chocolate vs. matzo.
Coulda dropped the mic right there.
5) There is certainly a much, much deeper meaning to both of these religious time of course. So, too, in the case of Islam and Ramadan. The death and subsequent ascension of Christ is the single most significant aspect of the Christian faith: humans are saved and a path to Heaven is opened through the miracle of Christ rising from the dead. Passover is also a story of salvation, albeit a less ephemeral, more concrete one: God, through Moses, leads his people out of slavery through the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. Ramadan marks the first showing of the Quran by the Prophet Mohamed. All three stories invoke a God who is present in the daily life of his people. All three religions celebrate this on holidays around which a part of their calendar revolves. All who follow these religions are asked to believe that the stories are factual.
Are they? Could they be? Are the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ, the parting of the Red Sea by Moses or the presentation of the Quran the AP news accounts of their day? Or are they allegorical, fables meant to teach the underlying principle of a kind and gracious God who awaits us at the end or our days? Here, I would say, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether you are weak, powerful, or somewhere in between, because it is the viewpoint that matters, not necessarily the facts. You either believe in something that came before and will be there after, or you don’t. The facts, in this case, don’t really seem to matter.
In the end it still comes down to faith.
On this day when Christians join in worship to celebrate an empty tomb while Jews gather around a table with an empty chair in the hope that Israel will join them, as Muslims emerge from their month of fasting, today at least we see the best of what religion can offer to people of faith. There is a certain hopefulness in Easter, Ramadan, and Passover, a hope that there IS a God, and that there IS something to come. Faith, though, is not limited to the Christian or Jewish or Muslim religions, nor is it limited to these highest of holy days. The religious have faith 24/7/365, right? So, too, do those of faith who are not necessarily religious in the Judeo-Christian or Islamic sense. One thinks of the deep spirituality of indigenous peoples around the world, for example, or the other great religions of the East like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the like. In all there is a deeply felt faith that there is more, in the end, than 3 squares and a place to lay your head.
I the end it still comes down to faith.
Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Blessed Ramadan. I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2026 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.