Palm Sunday

 Image: "The Mystical Boat", by Odilon Redon

On Palm Sunday we reach the quayside. 

A great ship is fretting at the moorings, sail unfurling in the bright sunshine; a beautiful ship with the line and grace of a bird.

A cry goes out from it: 'All on board!' and eager hands reach out to help us onto the deck; the hands of those who have made the journey before us and whose home is in the land to which we are invited.

This great ship of Holy Week will carry us surely, strongly, into the Passion of Christ. On the prow is blazoned the name 'Love's Victory’.

All we have to do now is board the ship and allow it to take us all the way. We have nothing else to do but let it take us.

We have not to do the navigating ourselves, we have not to labour with the oars, we have not to see where we are going or what distance we are covering: all that is being done for us.

We have only to say, 'Let it be done. Give me all you want to give. Be my Saviour, be my God.' Let us then board the ship full of humble gratitude and trust.

'But I have not got to the quayside even. It seems to me I have wasted Lent wrapped up in myself.’ Never mind.

Here you are, brought by the community of the Church. Get on board. Don't waste further time in useless lamentations which give no joy to God.

Get on board. 

The moorings are cast, the sails billow in the breeze, and we are carried off deep into the mystery of Jesus.

— Ruth Burrows

Amounting to Nothing, Brother Paul

 

Brother Paul Quenon, Photo by Rhonda J. Miller. 

Sorry monk that I am, I never amounted to nothing.

Somebody must have laid a curse on me and said, 

‘You'll never amount to nothing,’ 

which was my life ambition. 

But I'm still too much of something.

So this is, you know, 

there's a kind of undercurrent of a mystical tradition there. 

That is especially like in Zen Buddhism, 

where you just lose the, you know, 

slough off the ego and these false outer selves 

that we contrive for ourselves 

to get along and society, 

or to get ahead in the world. 

And amounting to nothing is, you know, 

the ultimate degree of humility is to, you know, 

be so free of myself, 

that God can fill the self. 

From: Aged in KY