Palm Sunday Pondering

My granddaughter Lucy is 26 months old. On Saturday night when I tell her that tomorrow is “church day” she cheers, and not only because that means she’ll get to eat cookies that Auntie Sharon gives her in the Coffee Connection after the service. No, Lucy also loves the few minutes each week when Miss Susi comes into the nursery and sings “Jesus songs” with the toddlers.

Thanks to Miss Susi, Lucy knows that there is a story about Jesus riding on a donkey, and people singing “Hosanna! Hosanna to the King!” She doesn’t know what that means yet, but she knows it happened.

She hasn’t heard thirty sermons (or fifty) on the fact that the crowd who cried “Hosanna!” on Sunday were the same who cried, “Crucify him!” on Friday. She’s just at the beginning of absorbing all this.

I think I envy her.

Beauty as Spiritual Food

This is a follow-up to a post from our friend BILTRIX which we subsequently re-blogged here, the subject being a rather unique ‘social experiment’ done in a Washington, DC metro station in January, 2007. 

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I went back and read the entire article by Washington Post staff writer Gene Weingarten, listened (twice) to the 43-minute audio of Joshua Bell’s solo violin performance and–while listening–read the author’s lengthy question and answer session with readers which took place two days after the article was published in April of that year.   

I was fascinated not only by the details of the article (which I remember reading back in 2007), but by the varied comments of the many readers who wrote in two days later. Most thanked Gene for his article. Many confessed that they either (1) had in fact walked by that day, or (2) thought they would have done so, had they been there.

Quite a few said that reading it moved them to tears.  Here’s one: