Revisiting Palm Sunday, Hunger of the Heart
Good Morning, I hope that you are enjoying the lovely August weather and continue to stay safe and well. I will be off for the next five Sundays of August and early September. But I have gathered together the series of special podcasts from holy week this last year for particular attention.
It is often supposed that Christmas is the great holiday in our tradition, and certainly it is a cause for celebration. But Holy Week, which begins with Palm Sunday and ends with Easter morning joy is in fact the highest of holidays in the Christian calendar. The core of our theology is based on The Passion Story, its wisdom teachings, and its spiritual lens. To understand the value of the Christian faith, one needs to understand The Easter Story. Without it, nothing else really quite makes sense.
To understand The Easter Story, you have to be be able to let go of all you think that you know about it, and hear it again with fresh ears, big listening ears, for the story of Palm Sunday is about listening. It is about those who listened to something deeper than the culture in which they lived. How else did it come about that people gathered up palm leaves to wave in the breeze in the midst of the tumult that was the Roman Empire?
Listen again. And see if there is yet some new understanding of your faith to be realized. I am hoping there is.
Call to Worship
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings Email Campaign 03/29/2020
“As we navigate our own uncertain times together, may a thousand flowers of sanity bloom, each valid so long as it is viable in buoying the human spirit it animates.
And may we remember the myriad terrors and uncertainties preceding our own, which have served as unexpected awakenings from some of our most perilous civilizational slumbers.”
Listen, Holly M. McGhee, Illustrated by Pascal Lemaitre, Roaring Brook Press, New York
“And when your heart hears your own story
It hears my story too.
Your story.
My story
Our story….”
“There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is curiosity. There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is vanity. There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.”
Rone Empire at Burnham Beeches. Photo by Tania Sheko
Jane Kenyon: ‘Otherwise’
I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.
At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.
Mother Teresa’s Birthday, from SALT’S Weekly Almanac
August 26 is the birthday of Mother Teresa, born Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, present-day Macedonia, in 1910. In Albanian, “Gonxhe” means "rosebud" or "little flower." After taking religious vows at the age of 21, she taught at a schoolhouse outside Calcutta, and soon began to be deeply disturbed by the poverty around her. On the train one day, she experienced what she later understood as a divine summons: "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith." She traded in her traditional habit for a simple, inexpensive white cotton sari with a blue border, and after two years of ministering to the poor, sick, and hungry on the streets of Calcutta, she received permission from the Vatican to start a congregation that would eventually become the Missionaries of Charity. By the time of her death in 1997, Missionaries of Charity had grown to more than 4,000 workers in 133 countries, opening orphanages, homes for people with tuberculosis and leprosy, soup kitchens, hospitals, mobile health clinics, and schools.
After her death, some of Mother Teresa’s private writings were published, revealing that for long periods of her life, she was haunted by feelings of loneliness, desolation, and God’s absence, even as she persevered in her work.
She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. Asked by the Nobel committee what advice she had for people who want to promote world peace, she said, “Go home and love your family.” Another interviewer once asked her about her practice of prayer, and she said, “When I pray, mostly I just listen.” “And what does God say?” said the interviewer. “Mostly, God just listens,” she replied.