Easter Week

Look here: a penny for your thoughts.
And have you given thought to how
strange a place is the world in which we
live? Where, for example, the holiest day
in the Christian calendar was book-ended
by oddly discordant events causing untold
grief and suffering and all ascribed to
chance and the deadly fury of hatred. How 
distant they are, France from Sri Lanka 
yet irrespective of where in the world one 
may venture there is the sacred and the 
profane. There is chance, there is misfortune
joy and sorrow and always one hopes to 
attain one and avoid the other. There are 
planned events of notable shock and awe 
and then there is coincidence. In 2018 
France saw 875 churches vandalized yet 
an anomaly destroyed the inner sanctum 
of an ancient cathedral; God's ways are 
indeed beyond scrutiny and explication
alerting the faithful to Easter Week. And 
in Sri Lanka martyrdom-aspiring jihadists 
reached their lofty goal surrendering not 
merely their heroic lives but those of others
not quite prepared to greet death in their
innocence, yet volunteering to die through 
the act of vulnerable worship. The deity 
that Islam and Christianity view as one of 
love and peace construed through sacred 
text as one of intransigent jealousy insistent 
that all must worship or none escape his wrath. 
This threat of divine fury is taken as proof 
of God's love for his creation, humanity.