Beth Arnold

Letter From Paris: Easter Parade

Crossposted at HuffPo.com.  Comments not included here.

The French may not be so religious--though they've been on a centuries-long roller coaster with the Roman Catholic church--but they're all for holidays, including Easter.  There will be an Easter fête, and Easter Monday will be celebrated as another day of observance and vacation. 

It would seem that Europeans have more days off than we could shake a stick at, while we Americans cut ours to the bone.  Lest one forget:  Europe is the Old World, and that includes religion, so holidays follow that of the old church, and that, New World American Protestants, would be the Catholic.  But Old World or New, Easter is the symbol of growth and renewal, and it's one of my favorite celebrations.  The coming of spring is reason enough to celebrate the natural cycles of life and our good earth, the baby plants and animals that are emerging into the world, the newborn leaves that are looking to the sun for their first breaths.

In Paris, and in typical French style, the windows are decorated everywhere we look.  But there is no doubt that the first order of Easter is for chocolate!  Boulangeries, pâtisseries, and chocolatiers have decorated their windows to the chocolate nth degree, and we are drooling over them.

Eric Kayser Artisan Boulanger  (Photo by Beth Arnold)

The World Is Transforming...What About The Catholic Church?

Image via Wikipedia

We are living in extraordinary times.  The world is shifting.  Events such as the global economic crisis, the election of Barack Obama, the earthquake in Haiti, and even the passage of health care legislation in the United States of America have cracked open our brains in the 21st Century.  We have cut the fat of institutions that weren't working (though still not nearly enough in the greedy financial industry).  As we watched terrible human suffering in Haiti, we've had a chance to give new thought to our place on this earth and what we can to do help others.  This is a hard lesson to remember in our fat lives.

The election of Barack Obama has opened the pipes of communication and commerce to a planet that had been blocked in every way imaginable by his predecessor's administration.  Now, conservative leaders and media stars like Rush Limbaugh, S. Palin, and Glenn Beck are so afraid of the beacon of light that many of us see and feel in these days of worldwide evolution that they they'll say or do anything--with no limit to their fear- and hate-mongering tactics--to grasp at controlling the minds of good American men and women.

And now, a religious potboiler has been thrown into our transformational mix.  The Catholic Church is being raked over the coals again for protecting child abusers, and Pope Benedict XVI has been singled out for his personal knowledge of and official protection of some of these offenders in years past.  (Christopher Hitchens wrote a good article at Slate.com about this subject here.  For the record, Hitchens is famously an atheist.)