Easter musings…4/20/2025
1. Who. Why is the word “who” for some reason different from, like, every other vowel in the English language. I mean, aside from stupid spelling stuff (stough?) routinely ridiculed by writers of all ilks (see: “enuf”), this one just strikes me as some kind of combination of silly and wrong.
“Who’s” means “who is”, as in “who’s going to mass tonight?” Totally get that. Not unusual in the least. It’s the possessive that runs afoul of literally every other vowel I can think of at the moment (no bonus points for finding another example unless it’s in your own 1000 work weekly missive). “Whose”. Why? Why do we need another way to assign ownership when [‘s] works perfectly well for every other noun?
Who’s going to tell me whose dumb idea this was?
2. Semiquincentennial. The unabashedly awkward word for 250th anniversary. Yesterday was the 250 Anniversary of “the shot heard round the world”. 250 years ago the American Revolutionary War tipped off with the Battles of Concord and Lexington (Massachusetts). If my math is correct that means Paul Revere careened across the (then) verdant fields and deserted roads of Greater Boston crying out “the British are coming”, his historic ride ending with two lanterns alight in the belfry of the Old North Church.
The British would come by sea.
T’was a time when every person educated in America learned the story of Paul Revere’s ride in grade school. We all learned that he earned his living as a silversmith; everyone could tell you that it was “one if by land, two if by sea.” The concept of American exceptionalism was introduced in grade school, Manifest Destiny in Jr. High, and the American Dream that came of these was the collective pursuit of our lifetimes. Generation followed generation. Even the schism that was our Civil War became taught as a single narrative, one that became more and more singular across the nation as we moved through two World Wars.
It wasn’t until the 1960’s that folks began to question the narrative. Largely, it seems, in response to the Viet Nam War and the “question everything” mantra in vogue, especially in our universities. Veils were parted and we were privy to an unvarnished view of contemporary leaders and historical figures alike. Our history, and with it the mores and behavior of our historically important figures were reexamined. Initially this reexamination was simply in the revealing of more facts about these (mostly) men, facts largely un-recalled in the shared history books or our youth.
Eventually, though, through the application of present day customs and mores to actions taken by individuals hundreds of years ago in worlds that bare only glancing resemblance to our modern societies, we have begun to forget just how singularly unique this American Revolution was at the time, and quite frankly for more than 150 years thereafter: we were the first people to shrug the yoke of imperialism in revolt, and to resist re-cloaking ourselves in anything that resembled it for 250 years. Unlike England (Oliver Cromwell), France (Napoleon Bonaparte), or Latin America (too many to mention), America did NOT slide back into dictatorship.
And yet, over the last 75 or so years we seem to have forgotten that ours is a nation that has continued to grow closer and closer to achieving Jefferson’s famously declared rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rather, we have seem to have chosen to emphasize failures of our forebearers to live up to both the written principles on which our country was founded, and our more modern interpretation of those principles. Ours is progress that has hardly traveled a straight line toward success. Time and again from the founding of our country until today we learn of the hypocrisies of our leaders. Washington, Jefferson, and even Franklin were slave owners. Jefferson, FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Clinton and Trump, all serial philanderers. Our quest for racial equality has hardly been a straight line race from the Confederate South to the present.
Here is Allen C. Guelzo in yesterdays WSJ: “But the failure to live up to principles is a common human failure. It may be precisely the loftiness of the Revolution’s principles that gives us high expectations of ourselves and then triggers a woe-is-us sense of disgusted resignation when we fall short.”
But principled progress we have had, and principled progress we seem to be destined to have. We need not ignore historical hypocrisy or mistakes. Indeed, we most assuredly should not forget or ignore either. We should rather acknowledge the inexorable history of success, however crooked the timeline has been, and use this as enduring fuel to drive us over the next 250 years. It is the principles of our nation’s founding, the principles that drove Paul Revere on his ride, the principles that gave fire to those first patriots in Lexington and Concord that should drive us through the haze of invective and rhetoric of our day.
We should be listening to the echo of that fateful shot 250 years ago, and directing our gaze to the trigger of its source.
3. Easter. A 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, 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.
There is certainly a much, much deeper meaning to both of these religious days of course. 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. Both stories invoke a God who is present in the daily life of his people. Both religions celebrate this on holidays around which a part of their calendar revolves. All who follow either religion are asked to believe that the stories are factual.
Are they? Could they be? Are the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ and the parting of the Red Sea by Moses 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 poor, 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, today at least we see the best of what religion can offer to people of faith. There is a certain hopefulness in both Easter 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 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 sense. One thinks of the deep spirituality of indigenous peoples around the world, for example, Islam, 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.
In the end it still comes down to faith.
Happy Easter. Happy Passover. I’ll see you next week…
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