palm sunday spirituality takes a life time...

Palm Sunday spirituality takes time - a life time of participation, reflection and quiet relinquishment, I suspect. It is not immediately obvious how to extract meaning from this complex and challenging story. It takes time. So this morning as we took in the Procession of Palms and the Passion Narrative at St. Paul's Chapel in NYC via the technology of the Internet, I became profoundly aware that it has been my privilege to sit with this liturgy and story for over 40 years. And it always evokes unexpected tears. Sometimes I weep in gratitude, other times in shame. I have known tears of aching sorrow on Palm Sunday as well as tears of anger, impotence and relinquishment. I am never able to fully complete singing "O Sacred Head Now Wounded" without a hearty cry. Nor can I get through the Passion Narrative without weeping.

What language shall I borrow 

to thank thee, dearest friend, 

for this thy dying sorrow, 

thy pity without end? 

O make me thine forever; 

and should I fainting be, 

Lord, let me never, never 

outlive my love for thee.

Today I returned thanks to the Lord for my tears. They are tiny gifts that I can never take for granted. They link my heart and life to Jesus. The wisdom of the Palm Sunday liturgy reminds me how fickle I can be. To use Fr. Richard Rohr's words, it exposes me to my false self and convicts me with the beauty and promise of my truest self. But there's no rushing this story nor short cuts to the end. To paraphrase The Supremes, "You can't hurry love - especially during Holy Week." Before God's blessings arrive, I must endure the truth of my false self. I must pass through Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday before the Feast of the Resurrection is mine.  For while it is never God's intention to cause me - or anyone else - pain, the good news of grace has a sting before it becomes salvific.

After worship, it was time to return to the task of clearing our land of winter's debris. We are halfway there. Dianne is discovering that during the decade when we were too busy to notice, the ground cover spread to mask beautiful rocks. A host of lilies and tulips have been hidden, too. And while raking up the remnants of autumn's leaves, the first crocus of spring made an appearance. To uncover the beauty of this place, takes time, too. That's another reason we're not planning on moving any time soon: we need to enter, experience and honor the promise of this place. My old back can only take 45 minutes at a time, so it is a very slow process indeed, but now is clearly the time for taking it slow.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, put it like this in a conversation with one of my favorite authors, Marrilynne Robinson. When asked about how to reclaim the gift of going slowly, he replied:

We need a range of disciplines of time taking. We need to encourage one another—encourage the rising generation—probably to do more gardening and more cooking. And then maybe you’ll save the world by gardening and cooking, in the sense that there are some things which are good only if you take time with them. Because we tend to assume, “Well, the quicker the better,” we don’t understand that the good of this activity is the time taken. (The Christian Century)

Today we have worshiped, prayed, shared Eucharist and sung the hymns. We have gardened, raked, gathered dog poop and discovered a crocus. Soon we will shower and rest, rework the guest room to better serve Dianne's on-line teaching gig, and then I will prayerfully prepare Shepherd's Pie. It only seemed fitting to cook a shepherd peasant's meal on the feast day of the servant shepherd king.