Palm Sunday

I imagine that faced with the rain we had on Sunday morning many parishes decided not to hold an outside procession for Palm Sunday. Because of our longstanding practice of holding a joint procession of Palms with our Christian brothers and sisters from S. George's we processed back from S. George's in the rain. I'm not sure I'd want to do it every year - even though with my clerical cloak I managed better than Fr David in his splendid cope - but it didn't seem to inappropriate in marking the transition from the joyful Palm Gospel to the sorrow of the Passion Gospel. Like many Churches we have a dramatic reading of the Passion, which I always find very powerful as a way of drawing us into the events of Holy Week. Reading the part of the Jesus one feels, just from the words, the rejection of the crowd closing in on you. If that's how I feel simply from the words of the Gospel how must our Lord have felt, rejected by his own people, abandoned by his own disciples. And how much of that pain is a result of the actions which we continue to do, the sins which are the greater pain that that of the nails themselves?

In the evening we had a beautiful service of Stations of the Cross. We are not a parish where there is a great tradition of praying the stations, but  a small number of us gathered to do so in the evening and found it very moving. This year I used a very simple set of meditations written with young people in mind (The Way of the Cross CTS Children's Books) which was beautiful. I had been toying with using Balthasar's Way of the Cross, which is excellent but aimed at a very different level. These were much more appropriate and deeply prayerful. I may get a copy for the Parish Library. Due to the generosity of the parish I am going to be able to go to the Holy Land on pilgrimage later in the year. Many of us cannot afford to do so, but meditations such as the Way of the Cross enable us to make a spiritual journey there. There is another opportunity to do this on Good Friday (11.00 a.m.) with our children's Way of the Cross. I can't recommend it highly enough.