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.