Palm Sunday

I seem always to find in Palm Sunday a call to stillness, to wordless prayer. Partly I think it comes from the agonisingly slow movement of the long Passion reading, from Bethany to the tomb, the steadily gathering weight of the cross, the closing in of the "obscurity and torments of [Christ's] Passion" (Thomas Keating), the appalling separation of the Son from God under the iron overcast of our own alienation. The enormity of that stills our every thought or feeling, stills our hearts almost as it stilled his.

Sister Mary David Totah writes:

The point here is that like our Christian life, Christian prayer is going to involve participating in the paschal mystery of Christ. We have to accept death sometimes in order to rise to newness of life. Trying to avoid such death is likely to lead to prayerlessness: just as in life, such avoidance leads to escapism, a lack of depth or commitment. "The less one prays the worse it goes" (Dom John Chapman). Like Christian life, prayer needs the dimension of faith, the conviction that God is acting in and through all the circumstances of our life.

The key here, I think, is to remember that it is "all the circumstances of our life"; even - especially - the worst, the most terrible times of alienation and betrayal, the most meaningless and demeaning times, all the pointless wasteful little occasions of anxiety and remorse as well as the unforeseen catastrophes. It's only by allowing it all into our prayer, surrendering the lot, without excuse or disguise, that our own dereliction, taken up in his, can become against all imagining, our Eastering.

Palm Sunday

Palm Sunday is a curious celebration. The heart longs for stillness, waiting for those last days - or mine does - and yet this beginning of Holy Week is full of re-enactment, acclamation, procession, that sit oddly, almost, before the long Gospel account of the crucifixion of our Lord. The Liturgy of the Palms precedes the Liturgy of the Passion, with this year the long reading from Luke's Gospel (22.14-23.56); and yet there is still most of a long week to go before Good Friday.

The silence is there, of course, beneath the shouting and the waving of palms, beneath the uncanny prophecy of Isaiah chapter 50 and Paul's hymn from Philippians 2, beneath the accelerating pain of the Passion narrative itself, just as the silence of our own death lies beneath all the laughter and weeping of our own lives here on earth. Good Friday will come, and the stillness of the tomb before that unimaginable morning, and undreamt glory...

Aerials, signs...

Divine action is not something material: it is invisible, inaudible, unexpected, unimaginable, and inexplicable by any analogy taken from this world. Its advent and its working within us are a mystery… Little by little, divine action grants to man increased attention and contrition of the heart in prayer… 

The spirit of prayer comes upon man and drives him into the depths of the heart, as if he were taken by the hand and forcibly led from one room to another. The soul is taken captive by an invading force, and is willingly kept within, as long as this overwhelming power of prayer still holds sway over it. 

Theophan the Recluse, quoted in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology, ed. Timothy Ware & Chariton of Valamo

Palm Sunday has a way of reminding us that we are all capable of both more good and less good than we had thought. The crowd who welcomed Jesus on the way into Jerusalem, the disciples who vowed to lay down their lives for their Lord, were the same people who later allowed themselves to be whipped up into demanding the release of a terrorist called Barabbas rather than Jesus; the same disciples who ran from the arresting officers; the same Peter who, having earlier sworn to die with him. swore he knew nothing of Jesus. We are no different; and yet there is a grace we do not suspect, working beneath all that we do, if we are open to the gift of the Spirit in us.

Bernard of Clairvaux wrote:

I admit that the Word has also come to me and has done so many times. But although he has come to me, I have never been conscious of the moment of his coming. I perceived his presence, I remembered afterwards that he had been with me; sometimes I had a presentiment that he would come, but I was never conscious of his coming or his going… 

Where he comes from when he visits my soul, and where he goes, and by what means he enters and goes out, I admit that I do not know even now, as John says, you do not know where he comes from or where he goes [Jn 3.8]. There is nothing strange in this, for of him was it said, Your footsteps will not be known [Psalm 77.19]… 

It was not by any movement of his that I recognised his coming; it was not by any of my senses that I perceived he had penetrated to the depths of my being. Only by the movement of my heart, as I have told you, did I perceive his presence.

We are not in the Jerusalem of the first century: we are in a strange, liminal place, all of us, and have been for a long while – since the first Easter. We do not know, any more than Bernard of Clairvaux knew, how exactly it is that the Spirit comes to be present in us, and yet

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 

(Romans 8.26-27)

We find ourselves walking through the world unarmed, vulnerable, available; with the prayer of Jesus himself in our hearts always, the Spirit interceding for us with sighs too deep for words. Being present to all we encounter as prayer, rather than needing consciously to say prayers, we are present as aerials, signs, receiving stations. The mist covers the distances, and our vision is not good; but Paul knew this, too:

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. 

(1 Corinthians 13.12-13)

Palm Sunday…

It is our emptiness in the presence of the abyss of His reality, our silence in the presence of His infinitely rich silence, our joy in the bosom of the serene darkness in which His light holds us absorbed, it is all this that praises Him.

Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

…and under the chaos and frenzy of Palm Sunday, the crowd shouting

“Hosanna!
Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—
   the King of Israel!”

(John 12.13)

runs like a great river this “infinitely rich silence” in which Jesus remains in his Father, and his Father in him, through it all.

Lent comes down to this: a moment on the path to the Cross, when the great prophecies lock together, and there is the sudden stillness of a course laid in.

Serving at the Eucharist this morning, it was all I could do at times to stay present to the Liturgy, and not to be drawn into the stillness, or into my own emptiness of heart before that glorious Is-ness…