Write for God

There’s spam and there’s Spam. The latter is the stomach-churning mystery meat on supermarket shelves and the former is the kind that shows up in your email box, uninvited and unread.

I have a friend who sends the best spam. Inspirational PowerPoints with spiritual themes, holiday cards with interactive games and every joke ever delivered ends up in my box from my friend Hendy. Occasionally, he’ll send the spooky Halloween gag that ends with someone shrieking on my computer screen to give me a near-heart attack, but usually his spam is pretty tasty.

He sent me spam recently that actually had facts worth pondering during this strange season when St. Joseph’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Palm Sunday, my son’s 22nd birthday and Easter all so incredibly intertwined. I’ve read that some Irish-Americans are going to give up their St. Paddy’s blowout in honor of Holy Week. My son’s birthday falls on Good Friday this year, which has never happened and, according to my friend’s spam, won’t happen again in our lifetimes. Read below:

Easter this year is Sunday March 23, 2008
As you may know, Easter is always the 1^st Sunday after the 1^st full moon after the Spring Equinox (which is March 20).
This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around on our Roman calendar.

Found out a couple of things you might be interested in!
Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22) but that is pretty rare.
This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives. And only the most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or above!). And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier!

Here’s the facts:
The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you’re 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that.
The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year 2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this year.

Confusing! No wonder I couldn’t believe my son’s birthday was almost here and that I haven’t thought about Easter cards yet. We’re in mid-March, for Heaven’s sake! When our son Dylan was little we could count on having an Easter outfit ready after his birthday had passed. This year, we’ll be commemorating Good Friday with prayer while he turns 22 on March 21.

It’s incredible that Sunday is Palm Sunday, the start of Holy Week. The Easter eggs in the kids’ baskets may still have frost on them. I’m not even in the mood for a spring dress in the middle of March.  I have a beautiful peach suit I could wear, but I’d probably still be shivering from our Florida winters that are mild to the rest of the nation but cold to us hot-blooded tropical folks. (Yes, anything below 50 degrees F. is cold to me!)

Green beer superseded by Holy Week, my son’s birthday on Good Friday and a once-in-a-lifetime early Easter: let’s just blame it on global warming or, better yet, on Spam. The icky pink stuff in the blue can, that is, not the kind that has information you might actually use.