Palm Sunday…the browned and roughened cross draped in dark purple, hovers over the edge of the altar rail. A crown of thorns, woven into a vicious circle, this ugly threat of sorrow to come, is placed atop the beam; jaunty cruelty, unspeakable grief.
The organ tune soars, pulling the parishioners forward, up and into the music along with the celebratory urgings. The sudden surge, the clumping stream of over excited children floods forward while each waves palm branches; fronds of hope strewn madly every which way. Leather-shoed baby feet rushing down the aisle…curly headed cherubs are scrubbed clean for this beginning of Passion week. Enraptured excitement…something is happening, but what?
Holy Week commencement…the children are running with gleaming eyes, jelly bean joy and visions of hot crossed buns. There are chocolate bunnies and promised baskets, pinks and corals and mint greens and woven purple. One or two whipper-snappers have that glint in their cherub eye…’take no prisoners with these greening leaves, methinks’.
Who will be the first one to arrive at the edge of the cross? Skipping, prancing and dancing, mincing and preening, laughing and chattering, chasing…no wait, there is one little freckled one…shy and reluctantly dragging branches and feet toward the altar’s corner. The tiny mob finds itself at last in the shadow of the cross…’O Sacred Head Now Wounded’ and everyone stops to place the battered ferns. The shy one places his leaves last.
Would that we all ran so blithely to that cross…the splintered boards which tear His flesh, those bloodied planks softened and mercifully covered today by bedraggled palms.
Toddler-pink grubby innocent flesh, all gussied up, return quickly to their parents waiting in the pews. There is a random jelly bean and a lacey white sock lying lost on the church carpet. At the corner of the pew sits a forgotten hair-comb and a well worn hymnal. White haired elders and the newborn, the healthy and the dying, the cradle and the grave, all are seated together today; shifting and re-settling in the pews after the rush to the cross; the detritus of human joy, frenzied innocence and ultimate tragic frailty.
Easter hope…bathes first in the shadow of lavender sorrow and in the three darkest hours yet to come…
