Palm Sunday

I'm ashamed to say I did not do my scripture reading this week. It was spring break, which gave me the freedom to become entirely consumed with my doctoral exams. My whole life this week has been a cycle of taking one exam, then studying for the next. I was supposed to be done on Thursday, but I realized I needed more time to finish preparing for the last exam, so I've pushed it back to Tuesday and have been studying on through the weekend. I'm exhausted.

Of course, this isn't an excuse for not keeping up with my spiritual disciplines. If anything, the stress and exhaustion makes it all the more important to be seeking moments of rejuvenation. (Hypocritically, I have been praying for help before taking the exams. The good thing about having a generous, gracious God who giveth liberally and upbraideth not is that you can get away with approaching him under those circumstances, but it also requires you to come face to face with how pathetic you are—how poorly you walk the talk.) The one thing I can say in my defense—if this can even be considered a defense—is that it isn't just the nourishment of my spirit I've been neglecting: I also haven't been properly nourishing my body. I've been sick all week, but I haven't allowed myself the rest I need to get over this damn bug for once and for all. I guess I'm saying I'm something like an equal opportunity offender—body and spirit both come in for neglect.

Anyway, enough public self-flagellation for the moment. Today's Palm Sunday. This afternoon I'll take part in a Palm Sunday service at the Advocate, the Episcopal mission where I also attended the Ash Wednesday service. If it's like previous years, we'll start with a processional in the parking lot with everyone waving palms and branches and flowers that members of the congregation have brought in to share. Then during the service there'll be a participatory reading of the Passion. I'll be reading the part of Caiphas, so I get to say things like, "What further need have we of testimony? With your own ears you have heard his blasphemy!" And then the entire congregation is supposed to take the part of the crowd calling for Jesus' death—"Crucify him! Crucify him!" Invariably at these services, whoever's conducting comments on how we go within a few minutes from shouting "Hosanna!" to howling for Jesus' death. It's supposed to represent how fickle and unfaithful we are in our Christian life...apropos to the self-flagellation I was doing just a couple minutes ago, actually.

The fact that the Advocate meets in the local Reconstructionist synagogue (kehillah) makes Passion Sunday rather more uncomfortable than it would already be. Here we are reenacting in a Jewish space a story that has served for two thousands years as a locus for Christian anti-Semitism. It makes you squirm. The first year Hugo and I attended Passion Sunday at the Advocate was the first year the Advocate met in the kehillah, and there had been quite a bit of anxious talk in the weeks leading up to the service—about how the service ought to be framed in the interest of being aware of how the Passion story has helped fuel anti-Semitism and actively resisting that way of reading it.

I feel at this point that I ought to launch into some kind of reflection along the lines of "What Palm Sunday means to me." But I can't really claim that I've been doing a lot of thinking about it. And actually, some of the books I've been studying for my doctoral exams have made me self-conscious about how cerebral much of my religious activity is. Why does religion always have to be about meaning-making? There are other ways to understand rituals than as "texts" waiting to be "read" for their meaning. (I've been reading Talal Asad, for readers to whom that might mean anything—his idea of religious practices producing certain kinds of dispositions or experience.) Anyway, I'm going to attend the Palm Sunday service; I'll try to be as fully present as I can for the experience; it will be what it will be. If I have some epiphany that makes me feel the service was "meaningful," so be it. But if not, the simple act of taking part is an expression, and an enacting, of my commitment to practicing a form of Christian religion. It's an act of worship—it's about going up to the house of prayer on the Lord's day to render oblations. I don't have to get anything out of it.

Apologies if I'm coming across as a "downer." Being sick and tired probably has something to do with that.

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Heavenly Father—

I'm grateful that my exams are almost over.
I give thanks that I feel like I've been doing reasonably well on them.
The experience of studying for the exams has helped me make intellectually satisfying or exciting connections between texts, has helped me get ideas for future research or writing, and has given me a feeling of accomplishment. I give thanks for all that.
The experience has also been humbling. It's made me painfully aware of how much I don't know... and I guess that's salutary, too, especially given how arrogant I tend to be. So I give thanks for that as well.
Please help me as I prepare for my last exam.
Help me to retain what I've been studying.
Help me to perform on the exam in a way that will effectively demonstrate to my readers what I know.

I look forward to taking part in the Palm Sunday service today.
I give thanks for the different ways that the story of your Son's sacrificial suffering has spoken to me over the years.
The story's important to me. It's one of the most important places? channels? (what's the word I'm looking for?) where I feel that I hear your voice.
You've touched me through that story. Your finger has touched me.
When I think of you, when I visualize you, some of the most important images I have to work with come from the story of Christ's Passion: a frightened man praying in a garden, a man on a cross, a man risen from the dead with scars showing where there were holes in his hands.
I suddenly have other things I want to say to you that I don't feel comfortable saying in this public setting. So I'll stop here and resume in a more private setting.