Good Friday and Pesach: the Right Personality and the Right Cup

On Good Friday and during Pesach, here's from Anne Lamott and from Amy Stone:

[Good Friday 2005]

     I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.
      In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives.
      What is there to do in such difficult, violent times?  I try to follow my own advice to take short assignments, and do shitty first drafts of my work, and most of all, to take things day by day.  Today I am going to pray that our soldiers come home soon.  I am going to pray for the children of American and Iraqi soldiers, for the innocent Iraqi people, for the POWs, for humanitarian aid, and for our leaders.  I am going to pray for the children and youth in Oakland and East Palo Alto and Palestine and Israel.  I am going to pray to forgive one person today -- to give up a soupçon of hostility....  

--Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (pages 140-41).

.......

(April 8, 2009)

I am fuming. [yes, Moi.]  I was just in West Side Judaica (Manhattan’s Upper West Side) where a little boy was saying to his grandparents, “We need a Miriam’s Cup.”

Grandfather (60-something, could pass for a liberal-congenial-spirit): “No, we don’t.”

Moi (seething): “Yes you do.”

Grandfather: “What did Miriam do?”

Moi: “She provided the well of fresh water that kept the Jews alive in the desert.” (I was so enraged, I didn’t even mention Miriam led the women a song of rejoicing after the crossing of the Red Sea.)

Grandfather: “That was after Passover.”

Moi: So angered [was I that], it didn’t even occur to me to say So was Elijah.

But final shot: Grandmother taking Kos Miriam selected by the little boy to the cash register, where the Orthodox male will ring up the sale.

Hag sameach.

–Amy Stone, "Pesach dead hand of the past"