I'm totally guilty of erratic blogging, with four posts in one week after quite a long silence. I will try to do better.

This one just deserved its own entry rather than being tucked away at the end of our March for Babies post below.

This morning on the way to Palm Sunday Mass, I was attempting to explain Holy Week to the boys. Edward remembered the palms from last year's service. At our church, they have all the children gather at the back of the church to form a palm-waving procession after the "entry to Jerusalem" Gospel is read. Edward is also more than a little bit interested in the idea of the Crucifixion--Why would anyone want to kill Jesus? I've simplified it by saying that some people were afraid of Jesus and the things he was teaching.

So we moved on to Holy Thursday and the Last Supper, Good Friday (why is it "good" if it's the day Jesus died?") and finally Easter Sunday and the Resurrection, leading to the inevitable question, "How can someone come back from being dead."

"Well," I said, "that's pretty hard to understand, isn't it. Even grow-ups don't really understand it. It's just something we believe even though we can't see it for ourselves. That's called 'faith'--when you believe even though you can't see it."

Then a moment of quiet in the back seat until Daniel started singing, "Grandma got run over by a reindeer..." Which seemed like quite the non-sequitur until he got to "You can say there's no such thing as Santa, but as for me and Grandpa, we believe."

So there you have it. Theology according to a three-year-old.

Oh, and Edward came back from the children's liturgy with the answer to the question about Good Friday: "It's 'good' because when Jesus died he opened Heaven for all of us. Before he died none of us could go to heaven."

I guess that's why I keep taking them back week after week, even when it seems like the only thing they're paying attention to is their fruit snacks.