I often tend to get more engaged in Advent than in Christmas, and the same is true of Palm Sunday: sometimes anticipation of excitement is easier to embrace than the event itself.  Certainly, the Palm Sunday parades the children participate in every year, as they did this Sunday, signify the greatness and the importance of what rode into Jerusalem with the donkey: the incarnation, redemption, truth.  And, it was too much for the existing social order to accept.  It is lovely, sometimes, to sit still in the moment of excitement, and consider the happy hosanas from the children of Jerusalem, than to reflect on the death that followed.  It is not lost on me, this year, that the marches of children and youth on Washington for gun control took place on the weekend of Palm Sunday: more parades of children.  I pray that the possibility of social change, and better protection, for those children will be as profound as the resurrection that followed Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, as real as the thousands of years of Christendom that followed.

Rebecca B.