Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday - Letting Go

From The Daybook: A Contemplative Journal:

“Spring is never easy. She can’t seem to make up her mind, one day balmy and the next drizzly, one day anxious for summer’s fields...She lives by fits and starts, delays, and pronounced mood swings...

The only way to live spring is to let her be, to allow her to pass through us. When we are young a certain degree of flexing ourselves against life is proper. How else can we learn our own strength? But resistance is unbecoming in the mature. Rage against the coming of the night only leaves us empty and spent! Little is ever wrenched from life by force. When we give up battling, we find what we are looking for....What we really want can only be ours when we stop grasping for it. If we stop the struggle, what we want comes one day almost uninvited...We pound away on the anvil of our thoughts in hopes of an answer, but it is not until we let go the struggle that the answer comes...

Ultimately spring teaches us that to fight against what is is foolishness. When the cherry blossom falls and you suddenly realize that you only have so many days to be with the one you love, fall with the petal. Love is in the falling, not the staying. The life we desperately want comes to us when we cease clutching it...We can only have each other as we let each other go...”

Jesus let go. He “fell with the petal”. This is what the Sunday of the Passion: Palm Sunday is all about.  “...He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death -- even death on a cross. Therefore, God [also] highly exalted him...” “The life we desperately want comes to us when we cease clutching it.”

The humbling of Jesus doesn’t refer as much to his Incarnation as to his voluntarily serving others, to the point of death, without any assurance that what he did would be  vindicated or justified, or even acknowledged. Jesus bids us to live our version of abasement and exaltation, of “letting go to keep”. You and I are called to honor one another by becoming as a servant, obedient even to the point of inconvenience, mistrust, or, perhaps, humiliation.

Without accepting and embracing this, we may celebrate the mystery of Jesus’ death and resurrection this week, but we’ll never understand it. Julian of Norwich remind us: “God gives joy freely as it pleases him, and sometimes he allows us to be in sorrow, and both come from his love.” In one of her other showings or visions Jesus says to Julian: “Since I have set right the greatest of harms, it is my will that I shall set right everything which is less.”  

In our lives the joy of Easter resurrection lies ahead of us and it is unquestionably real. But there must first be the dying, the humbling, the letting-go: even as it was for Jesus. There must be, as Blessed Julian says, “the Passion of our Lord as comfort to us against the purging pain caused by our sins...He comforts readily and sweetly with his words, and says: ‘But all shall be well, and every kind of thing shall be well...”