Daily Nourishment for Palm Sunday: Finding Our Way to God
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 40 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
Join me TODAY, Sunday, March 29 on Zoom at 5:30 p.m. CT for a Popup SDW Daily Nourishment Gathering
We’ll take 15 minutes to do the Pause, Prompt, & Practice. Then whoever wants to stick around and chat a bit is welcome to do so. These sessions won’t be recorded. Email me at charlotte@charlottedonlon.com if you’d like the Zoom link for today’s gathering or if you’d like to be notified of future SDW Daily Nourishment popups.
Today marks the beginning of Holy Week in the Christian tradition. SDW Daily Nourishment will provide Pauses, Prompts, and Practices to help readers explore the meaning of this liturgical season and notice personal connections between these specific days and our present realities.
“Human beings characteristically see patterns and make connections. Christians ought to celebrate that faculty and receive it as part of how we find our way to God.” - Lauren Winner, “Encountering Art and Encountering God”
Pause.
Take deep breaths with a six-count inhale and a six-count exhale while looking at the art below. (Learn more about this art at artandtheology.org.)
Prompt.
Read this sonnet by Malcolm Guite. You can listen to Guite read it here on his website.
Palm Sunday
Now to the gate of my Jerusalem,
The seething holy city of my heart,
The saviour comes. But will I welcome him?
Oh crowds of easy feelings make a start;
They raise their hands, get caught up in the singing,
And think the battle won. Too soon they’ll find
The challenge, the reversal he is bringing
Changes their tune. I know what lies behind
The surface flourish that so quickly fades;
Self-interest, and fearful guardedness,
The hardness of the heart, its barricades,
And at the core, the dreadful emptiness
Of a perverted temple. Jesus come
Break my resistance and make me your home.
Practice.
Set a ten-minute timer and respond to the visual art and poem shared in today’s Daily Nourishment.
You can respond in any way you like. Take notes or freewrite or draw a picture.
Here are a few questions to respond to, if helpful:
What do the art and poem make you more curious about?
What do the art and poem show you about yourself and the divine?
How do you want to inhabit today and the coming week?
Want More?
Here’s another poem to read and respond to: “Palm Sunday” by Eugene Gloria.
And here are a few words on Palm Sunday from Frederick Buechner from a 2003 interview:
On Palm Sunday:
I looked back at the account in Luke of Palm Sunday. It’s only there you find it where Jesus, as he approaches the city, looks at it and weeps. Except for the weeping over Lazarus, I don’t know anyplace else in the New Testament where he is shown as weeping. And he weeps because he says, “Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that make for peace.” And he says, “The time is not far off when your enemies will set an encampment against you, and they will dash you against the rocks and your little ones with you and leave not one stone upon the other, because you did not know the time of God’s coming to you.”
“Would that you knew the things that make for peace.” He could be saying that just as easily today — would that the world, the United States, knew the things that make for peace. In a way they do, but they don’t somehow live out of those things; they live out of other things, antagonisms and fears and aggressiveness and things of that kind. I thought a lot about Jesus’ tears for Jerusalem, how he would be weeping still, again, today for the same reason: “Would that they knew the things that make for peace.”
It was a pathetic little procession. I think if you had been there, it wouldn’t have amounted to much — somebody from nowhere riding on a donkey into a city. No television cameras, no hoopla, no band. But nonetheless, as his life went, it was his moment of triumph, and people hailed him as the Son of David and [said], “Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.” Yet people are so fickle, as has often been pointed out. Within a week or less than a week of that, they were saying, “Crucify him.”
I can’t help thinking of the stories one hears out of Iraq about the Iraqis running out and embracing American soldiers and giving them flowers. But three weeks from yesterday, who knows what they’ll be doing — shooting at them from windows as we will be shooting at them. Because the world is mad. It’s always been mad — never known the things that make for peace, never acted out of them … or rarely.
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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