Palm Sunday c 2025
13 April, Jack Hardaway
The parish where I grew up is on the top of a small mountain.
On Palm Sunday we would gather outside in the neighbor’s yard overlooking the city.
Don’t worry. They gave us permission. At least that was what I was told.
It was where I grew up all the way through college.
The Palm Sunday gathering by the overlook was part of what we did.
One of the strong memories of that day is that one of my Sunday school teachers would always play the trombone, playing All Glory Laud and Honor and lead us across the street and into the church.
The same group of tall skinny ladies in long dresses would take turns each year in playing the trombone. The trombone was pointed up high, so as not to hit anyone.
They would start playing and walking, their legs moving in long strides, poking their dresses way out, like a drum major of a marching band in the mountain top breeze. I can still hear the wah, wah of the trombone. It had a home spun feel to it, like most things, growing up in my home parish.
So one of my teachers would lead us in every year, a rag tag group of parishioners, on a breezy small mountain, our bulletins flapping in the wind, with the wah wah of the trombone.
When I was in college I left for a couple of years to help a friend with their youth group, and I came back on Palm Sunday to start my discernment for the priesthood, and picked right back up where I had left off, and we walked into holy week together, the trombone and my old favorite teachers, and the rag tag people singing in the breeze.
Growing up, Holy Week always seemed like a very adult thing that I tagged along with. It was one of the mysteries of adult things that both made me curious and turned my stomach. Brutal violence, sin, death, betrayal, suffering, desire, shame, greed, grief, surprise, joy, and the strangeness of God, especially that strangeness, the holiness that still allures and repels all at once.
I still feel like a child when Holy Week arrives, considering once again mysterious and scary adult things.
I feel like this is the week where we start over every year, reconsidering the deep things of faith, life and being part of the ragtag procession of humanity.
I think that experience of entering into Holy Week as a child walking among the unfathomable, the inscrutable, the horrid and then a joy that displaces all words and comprehension is closer to the truth than any other experience of this week.
We walk as children among adult things knowing that we will fall from grace wondering what comes next. Trusting. Trusting. Trusting. That Easter is coming. That the sun will rise on an empty tomb.
We walk as children among adult things.