Haroset

When I met Bruce, I attended a church, sang in the choir, did the whole nine yards. I even wrote the Lenten and Advent lectionaries every year.

It was a liberal Presbyterian church in Austin. And frankly, it was a bad time in my life: a nasty divorce, coming out, career upheavals (years and years of a Ph D program and then finally a job teaching at a liberal arts university all led to the whole "I got to get out of academia" mess).

So liberals took me in.

Now, years later, up in liberal New England, I'm still the one goading us on to religion. Left on his own, Bruce probably wouldn't celebrate any religious holiday. So every year, I write the haggadah for Passover. And it's sort of crazy, with people acting out the parts of Moses, Pharaoh, and the rest. I even have plastic bugs and sunglasses and other things to act out each of the plagues.

Thus, I find myself making the haroset today. For the uninitiated, haroset is supposed to represent the mortar with which the Israelite slaves were to build Pharaoh's temples. It's pretty sweet stuff, perhaps to symbolize how God can turn bitter slavery into sweet redemption.

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