preparing for palm sunday like never before...

There was a break in the "April showers" in the Berkshires today so we spent a few hours raking and hauling leaves. All types of leaves: moldy ones, wet ones, dry ones and those creating cover for moths, butterflies and who knows what? I LOVE being out in this yard and exploring everything that needs to be helped and encouraged. It makes my body ache - and feel alive. We soaked up the sun, too as we worked side by side and that was restorative. 

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday: never before have I experienced a Palm Sunday like this in all my nearly 68 years! For 40 of those years, give or take one or two, I have had the privilege of reading the Passion narrative in public worship. For the last two years I have entered into Holy Week watching Trinity/St. Paul's worship online, been a part of the celebrations at L'Arche Ottawa, and then schlepped down to NYC to mark the Feast of the Resurrection with Louie's choir and the whole Brooklyn gang - including two Italian Easter feasts with the extended family that were remarkable and grace-filled. Not so now: I will mark this feast online with people from all over the world and then quietly shelter in place with Di - perhaps making falafel and fatoosh for supper. Back in the day I used to quote the hymn, "Once to Every Man and Nation," noting that "time makes ancient truth uncouth." This year, that takes on a whole new meaning as our feast day is celebrated in solitude and humility. In just a moment I am going to go out back and cut a small evergreen sprig to use for the liturgy: no palms and NO sharing allowed this year.

For the past four weeks we have self-isolated save one trip to the grocery store on Thursday and a solitary car ride through the region last Sunday. I have spoken in-person to my neighbor twice in the drive way. We have Skyped with our Brooklyn family 3 times and I spoke to the hill town crew once last Sunday. I love the quiet but it all feels upside down. I think that's appropriate for this Palm Sunday. The severity of death is real within my heart now - no longer an obscure, distant abstraction. Same, too with the reality that I could die if I am not careful. Earlier this week I was asked if I might visit a person I did not know in the hospital as he moves closer to death. Ordinarily, I would not hesitate to help out our local hospital. But now, given my age and previous disposition to pneumonia - let alone Di's precarious health and any possibility of passing before my grandchildren mature - I had to ask them to find someone else. I am keenly aware of my own mortality - and what I feel called to do in the short time that remains.

And I want to be a part - albeit it tangential and small - of the rebuilding after this plague. It will be a time unlike any other since WWII when the possibility for greater compassion is viable again - and caring for one another essential. Rebecca Solint, whom I don't always understand, put it best in her reflection on hope written at the start of the Iraq war:

The moment passed long ago, but despair, defeatism, cynicism, and the amnesia and assumptions from which they often arise have not dispersed, even as the most wildly, unimaginably magnificent things came to pass. There is a lot of evidence for the defense… Progressive, populist, and grassroots constituencies have had many victories. Popular power has continued to be a profound force for change. And the changes we’ve undergone, both wonderful and terrible, are astonishing ... This is an extraordinary time full of vital, transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It’s also a nightmarish time. Full engage-ment requires the ability to perceive both.

So, like Palm Sunday itself, I hold fear and hope together - the reality of death and isolation along with the presence of life and community - and trust that in the final analysis: grace trumps karma. I love these words and insights that Solint posits better than most preachers - myself included!

After a rain mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many do so from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but less visible long-term organizing and groundwork — or underground work — often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists, and participants in social media. It seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights... Ideas at first considered outrageous or ridiculous or extreme gradually become what people think they’ve always believed. How the transformation happened is rarely remembered, in part because it’s compromising: it recalls the mainstream when the mainstream was, say, rabidly homophobic or racist in a way it no longer is; and it recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage. Our hope and often our power.

As I often sing while washing my hands these days: Glory be to the Creator. And to the Christ and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be: world without end. Amen. Amen. If you can, and are so inclined, join me tomorrow (Sunday, April 5) at 9:55 am.