Palm Sunday

Do you have hope for the future?
Someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…

The future, yes, and even the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.

-David Ray, from Sam’s Book, courtesy of the The Center of Faith and Politics

One of the greatest “numbing forces” in our lives is the should've, would've and could've -- Our tendency to look back and say “if only.” Frost reminds us that God buries our sins in the sea of forgetfulness and post a “no fishing” sign on the spot. We began this Lent with “All shall be well,” and as we approach Easter we need to remember that “all shall be well.” Our past is forgiven and forgotten.

Webb