Palm Sunday in a Pandemic
Today, like so many millions of people around the world, my family celebrated Palm Sunday under quarantine. Of all the tiny griefs of the pandemic, knowing I wouldn’t be able to attend Holy Week services at my church has been an especially achey one for me. Holy Week is the most important time of the year in my spiritual life. Bookended by the pastel crowds of Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday services, I most enjoy the solemn and strange liminality of the less popular services throughout the week. I wash the feet of strangers on Maundy Thursday, and walk the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. These past few years I’ve had a baby in my belly or strapped to my chest for this small and solemn ritual journey. Whether in my belly or on my chest, they were always still and silent during the procession, as if in awe or somehow out of reverence for the sheer magnitude of the suffering. I love Holy Week because it’s a container for everything I love about the Christian tradition. It is tragic and triumphant. It is painstaking and paradoxical, as mystical as it is embodied.
To be totally transparent, I can’t really call myself a Christian in the way that so many Americans define the term. I don’t believe Jesus is the only or one true savior, whatever that even means. I don’t believe in a literal actual resurrection of Jesus’ physical body, not so much because it’s incredible but because it seems to me besides the point. To me, the point is that the story of Jesus is the most compelling metaphor for God, for the deepest reality, for whatever force accounts for the fact of our inextricability from one another and our capacity for transcendent love. Christ’s death and resurrection is the most perfect embodiment of the observable, but oft-shrouded reality, that death begets life. His horrific and gruesome crucifixion, a heinous act that no doubt seemed irredeemable to the point of absurdity to his followers, is the very crux upon which the triumph of resurrection hinges. God uses absolutely everything. In time, the gruesome can become beautiful. The distended and broken body of Jesus can become the body of Christ, the generations of followers who find themselves and each other in his story. The mangled and broken body of Jesus begs in the viewer the ultimate question. “Even this?” we ask God. “Especially this,” God answers. To move through Holy Week, for me, is to hold that question and God’s answer in my own body. In this pandemic, when the sheer scale of human suffering feels gruesome and absurd, I hold them even more tightly.
And so it was a bit sorrowfully that I sought to embark on this first step into Holy Week with my small family and without the physical presence of my church and its congregants. But, like so many aspects of this new life in quarantine, I was surprised by the small delights and deeply meaningful moments, and most of all by my own ability to be present, which is not typically my strong-suit.
We started with a foraging trip to find palm leaves. I set out with my husband and our two sons, a toddler and an infant. I wanted to listen to gospel music, but my toddler wanted to listen to either “Despacito” or the Moana soundtrack. We settled on the Moana soundtrack. I tried to meditate on Jesus’ triumphal return to Jerusalem and the terror of the subsequent passion, but my toddler kept interrupting me. “”Is this the audio of the movie, mommy?” “What?” I asked, “Yea, it’s the soundtrack.” “No mom, IT’S THE AUDIO! I WANT TO HEAR THE AUDIO OF IT!”
We had nearly reached the Presidio when I realized I had neglected to bring scissors. “Stop stop STOP!!!” I shouted when I saw that some palm leaves had fallen near Crissy Field. I ran out in the rain to grab them, but they were gnarled and yellow and hard, nothing like the palms at church. We kept driving. Finally, we found the perfect palm trees hidden right next to a eucalyptus grove on the Western edge of Golden Gate park. It was raining and the whole place was a glorious, gobsmacking green. Had anything ever been this green? Let alone everything in sight? I took a deep breath of the eucalyptus air and got to work. My toddler and I held the branch while my husband pulled off four of the leaves, only as many as we needed for our small family. I felt guilty and grateful. They were truly perfect, exactly like the ones at church each year. Holding them gave me such a swell of recognition and longing. “Thank you, Palm Tree!” I yelled up. “Thank you! We love you!” my toddler echoed.
At home, I found a YouTube tutorial on how to fold the palms into small crosses. It was a series of tedious and mildly confusing steps, and so I recruited my husband the engineer to do it while I held the baby at the dining room table. “It’s like he’s making it confusing on purpose, he keeps changing the angle!” my husband lamented. He huffed and sighed, but when he finished his first small perfect cross he beamed with pride. Continuing with the other three, he said, “I can see how you’d get really fast at this really quickly,” and then smiling he shared, “it was always the altar boys who had to do all these in the Greek church. Now that I’m doing it I remember.” It was so sweet to see my husband, who gamely attends church for my benefit after mostly dispensing of religion following a serious and sometimes severe upbringing in the Greek Orthodox church, smile at this memory. I’m always wishing for those small moments of delight and transcendence at church for him, always watching him out of the corner of my eye during a particularly stirring sermon or a beautiful procession, hoping to see a glimmer of inspiration and recognition. It is quite stunning to see it at our dining room table with our children, some palms, an iPhone, and a pair of kitchen shears. Even this? Especially this.
Finally, at 11:00, it was time to livestream the service on our living room television. By this point, despite the fact that my toddler and I were dressed in fancy church clothes, the rest of the family was kind of over Palm Sunday. We had already done a lot. My toddler went to his room to play Legos while my husband fed the baby lunch and cleaned the kitchen. He made it easy for me to watch the service and listen to the sermon, an act of love that I could feel in my (so rarely) empty hands and deep in my chest. When the service moved to prepare for communion, a novel notion struck me — I have Pita chips! I have red wine! I brought a glass of red wine and four pita chips over to the windowsill by the television. I stood across from the image of the Reverend Canon Dr. Ellen Clark-King, and copied her every gesture — speaking along with the words I already knew by heart. I called out to my toddler, “Do you want a Jesus pita chip?” “YES!!!!” he called back and ran into the living room. “The body of Christ, the bread of life,” I said, and fed him the chip as he gripped his C3PO figurine unceremoniously. I broke off a small piece for the baby. He moaned approvingly. I turned to my husband. He crossed himself three times the Orthodox way. I fed him the chip and the wine. “The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” Then, he did the same for me. The gifts of God for the people of God.
I gathered up the palms and processed myself back to the dining room table and sat for a moment. I looked at the walls of our old Victorian flat. These walls were here during the 1918 Flu Pandemic. A family lived here just like mine, afraid and full of wonder, leaning into one another and drinking in each moment, memorizing one another’s faces and smells, touching each other more fondly and for longer.
This morning several of the clergy leaders of my church held an online meeting to talk about Holy Week at home. The Reverend Mary Carter Greene noted that our worshipping this way is not unlike the early church, when it was a crime to be Christian. Christians worshipped in their own homes and with their families, quietly and covertly. I quite like this connection. It helps me to remember that in the ancient lineage of our traditions is a home, a warm and sacred place to rest. I’ll be carrying it with me all week.
