Even though I am a visual learner, I still love words. Words hold power. They can hurt, but they can also heal. And yet, despite their power, words often fall short.

I am not alone in feeling that words fell short this past week when we tried to respond to the shootings at Virginia Tech. For those of us who tried to use them to heal, to comfort, to express sympathy and remorse, they fell short. For those of us who tried to use them to explain, to understand, to analyze the situation, they fell short.

And so everytime I sat at this desk and tried to write something in response to the events of this past week, words failed me. One of my favorite biblical authors, the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes, has put it well: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: ...a time to keep silence, and a time to speak" (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7b).

For me, this past week was a time to keep silence. I am fully aware that words still fail me this week, but words are all I have. And for now, all I feel that I can say is that 33 people died on April 16, 2007, that one of those 33 people killed the other 32, and that death sucks.

I do not at this time have words to heal or to comfort. I do not yet (and never intend to) have words that explain or understand what happened (or, for that matter, what happens every day in America and in other parts of the world when death comes prematurely to so many innocent people). So in using the limited words, the limiting words, with which I am left, I continue to keep a sort of silence. It is the season for such a silence, one that will eventually give way to a time to speak more fully. But words cannot be forced. They come when they are ready. And so until then, I hope my silence says at least in part what I have not yet found the words to say.

This morning, my host mother shook her head and laughed as she buttered a chunk of French bread. The radio on the kitchen counter crackled out the morning Catholic prayer, and my host mother smiled as she lamented, "You'll go back to the United States and tell all your friends that you lived with crazy people who listen to morning prayers."

She was joking, of course, but one of the things that I really like about this semester I'm spending abroad in France is that I've gotten a chance to really dig down deep and think about my faith in a pretty lonely context. France historically is a Catholic state and today tries to practice a sort of secularism, so living with this conservative and practicing Catholic family is sort of a miracle. But the real blessing was spending a week in a village with a Protestant woman who practices her faith with a love that is both remarkable and neverending. And because this semester is a sort of repose from the stresses of ordinary university life, I've been able to really reflect upon the implications of life, love and faith, in contexts that are both ordinary and extraordinary.

So while learning French has been a great product of this semester, I feel certain that I have learned more about how life really works by listening to the morning prayers of my Catholic host mother and by observing the intense love of my new Protestant friend. Revitalized and reconvinced that love and faith, in fact, can literally change to world and the ways in which we look at it, I feel more confident in our ability as human beings to be the agents of that change. And that's not too shabby a lesson to learn from a radio's crackle.

Hillary is a junior at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. She is a member of NNPCW's Coordinating Committee.

Easter Sunday has always been a big deal in my family. My grandparents are from the Ukraine, and in the Ukraine, Easter is the holiday of all holidays. Preparations begin weeks before the feast, centering mostly around making special foods like holubtsi and varenyky (more commonly known as perogies) and decorating pysanky (Ukrainian Easter eggs).

I decorated my first pysanka at the age of 4 or 5. Every year, shortly after Ash Wednesday, my mother would take her jars of rainbow egg dyes out of the cupboard and set them out on the kitchen counter. In the weeks that followed, my mother, my sisters and I would make egg after egg for friends, teachers, and relatives. It was my favorite time of the year.

Ukrainians have been decorating pysanky since before the birth of Christ. When the Ukrainians became a Christian people in the late 900s, they recognized that the egg is a perfect symbol for the ressurrection, and they continued carrying on the tradition, giving it new meaning as they added Christian symbols to their intricate designs.

With the over-commercialism of every major holiday--including Easter--our symbols are often co-opted and consequently lose their meaning. For most of us, Easter eggs are objects to find on a hunt, magical delights filled with chocolate and jelly beans, put in their hiding places by the ever-elusive Easter Bunny.

For me, making pysanky is as much an act of subversion as it is a family tradition. It is a way to reclaim the meaning of Easter and its symolism using the very same object--an egg--that our consumeristic culture tries to make into a mass-produced, mass-marketed holiday product. It is a tradition for which I have not made much time in the last several years, but one that I am hoping to revive as I think about the values and beliefs that I want to pass on to my son.

What are your Easter traditions? What are the ways in which you reclaim the meaning of Easter?

Happy Easter everyone.

I'm too overcome with the mysterious joy of holy week to write any more than that.

Christ has risen! Alleluia!

I learned two new verbs today: to friend and to facebook.

If these words mean nothing to you, you are still in the 20th Century, a dark, distant land I exited only 3 short hours ago.

Yes, that's right: I am now a bona fide Facebook user, complete with my own profile, my NNPCW group, and--my personal favorite--the ability to poke.

Some of you may recall my first blog post on this fabulous site. It was in fact my first blog post ever. So you probably aren't surprised by the fact that I have just recently made my entree into the land of friending and facebooking. But you're right, it did take me a long time to get here. Too long.

I am of a different generation than young women in college today. My friends and I went all the way through college without cell phones--literally NO ONE we knew had one. We all got our first email accounts as college fresh(wo)men. And we had to be taught what to do with them. But worst of all, walking around my college campus you might have even spied a Walkman.

Indeed, I'm of totally different generation.

So it was a little difficult for me to understand the hype around Facebook. But I stepped out into the unknown today and found that the technology and tools of the 21st century aren't as scary as I thought they were. In fact, I kind of enjoyed playing around on Facebook this morning. I hope if you haven't already checked out the National Network of Presbyterian College Women group on Facebook that you will. I hope that you'll join it, too. And I'm actually hoping that while you're there, you might just go ahead and friend me...