Holy Week

The hymns and the palms were just as I remember from childhood this Palm Sunday, but the sermon commemorated a different Passover miracle, the survival of one young girl, passed over in the massacre of thousands of Tutsis seeking sanctuary in a Rwandan church ten years ago this week. Saturday, my wife and I had gone to see The Dead Sea Scrolls in Ottawa. Nowhere in the exhibit did anyone question why people would feel the need to hide their holy books in jars in caves. And this was the week the wheels fell off the rickety peace with Iraq's Shia majority. So the tone at dinner was a lttle somber last night, as the zen abbot and the visiting taoism lecturer, the religion professor and the two mathmeticians, and the potter and the poet, and the rest of the sangha, gathered to dine on a Sikh buffet and celebrate the Buddha's birthday. Amid the flowers and incense, the chanting and the quiet, we soothed the baby Siddhartha with a bath of sweet tea.