Easter

I'm celebrating the night before Easter with depression and a gin and tonic.  Looks like the amount we owe for taxes this year is rather astronomical.  Which depressed us utterly.  How did we come to owe so much?  It's hard to understand how two established professionals with a single child who live modestly can feel so financially behind in life.  It's going to take us forever to pay off that educational and consumer debt and build a savings.

So, enough about that.

Tomorrow, with the celebration of family and spring and (for some) the miraculous Resurrection, my Spring will officially start.  I will wear a colorful dress, clad my son in a pastel green dress shirt, and with my husband join a few very dear friends for a restaurant brunch. This is the first Easter in a long time I will not be celebrating with blood family and a huge food production at home.  Instead, I will be celebrating effortlessly with some family of the heart and mind.  And for a religious type, and ironically, I will be celebrating a highly spiritual day with some very fine atheist skeptics.

These skeptics, which include my husband and the two friends, are so very dear to my heart.  Of the four of us, I'm the only religious type to stay religious.  The rest are religious types turned atheist.  Their reasons are varied, profound, convicting and honest.  And although it may be bewildering for some to look at me, an intellectual, and hear me say that I'm still religious, I have indeed kept my faith throughout everything.  Through the disappointment of how nasty and boring church people really are.  Through the deconversion experience my husband went through a few years ago, which tore my heart out and undid me.  Through every day's NPR broadcast of famine, war, strife, injustice and bigotry.

But why?  Why am I able to maintain a grasp on my spirituality while the other three didn't?  I don't know.  But right here and now, I would like to defend them - and me - and vie for a view that all humans are spiritual, whether they are religious or anti-religious.  My dear friend, let's call him Bob, pointed out that there is something categorically different about the human response of awe and wonder to the universe.  Even religious things can be argued to have come from evolutionary need.  (I'm not sure I agree 100% on this, but this is a complex discussion in and of itself.)  But there is something unique, profound, and deeply affecting about looking into the stars (for example) and feeling... something.  Skeptics feel, and they feel deeply.  I know, because I'm married to one.  Skeptics are deeply misunderstood at this period in time, and that's unfortunate.  All I'd like to say today, in the midst of my gin buzz, is that they have hearts and minds both.  And tomorrow's brunch will be no less joy filled because they do not share my faith in a miracle.

I hope.