Palm Sunday Mass was amazing. I am so happy at our new parish.
The processional song was All Glory, Laud and Honor (link plays music). I’d never heard it before.
This is the first procession I’ve ever seen that didn’t try to make everyone in the church cram into the lobby and then process awkwardly in. Instead the procession came in from the back and wound around and around the sanctuary. I was free to stand in the pew, sing joyfully, and drink the whole thing in. For the first time in my life, I felt I was watching the kind of Hosannas that greeted the Lord.
The procession included about a dozen Knights of Columbus in full regalia, including swords, delighting my four-year-old son. About thirty children followed, waving double fistfuls of palms. And I mean waving: not a gentle, dignified swaying, as I’ve always imagined, but rattling them excitedly like long rustly pompoms. Of course! And of course, that’s what it would have been. I never understood what was so special about being honored with palm branches. But they are streamers, they are ready-made flags to wave, to rattle excitedly, while you jump up and down and hope you’ll be noticed, if the hero turns his head your way when he passes by.
Youths carried banners bearing images of the crown of thorns, the lance, and other symbols of the Passion. All processed around and around the sanctuary, up and down the aisles, singing.
I couldn’t sing. I wept. It was just so dear and real to me.
The reading of the Passion was another new experience. This time it was chanted. The narrator sang a warm baritone. Pilate’s, the crowds’, the soldiers’ voices were sung by a powerful but reedy tenor. Our priest chanted the words of Jesus.
I thought of how singular it is that Palm Sunday Mass contains both Hosanna and Crucify him, how close together they are, how quickly popular sentiment can change. St Faustina writes in her Diary:
March 21, 1937. Palm Sunday. During Mass, my soul was steeped in the bitterness and suffering of Jesus. Jesus gave me to understand how much he had suffered in that triumphal procession. "Hosanna" was reverberating in Jesus’ heart as an echo of "Crucify."
What reverberates in our hearts?
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