Palm Sunday

This will be my last Post until Easter as I really want to embrace silence during Holy Week as much as possible so I am cutting back as much as I can. However, I find the reflection I mentioned yesterday from Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, so helpful that I want to copy it here; it is from the April Give Us This Day, pp120-121 :

"When we think of the passion of Jesus, we spontaneously think of it as the intense suffering he endured during his scourging and crucifixion. But that, true as it is, misses the real meaning. The English word passion takes it root in the Latin word passio, meaning passivity, and that is its real connotation here. The passion narratives describe what Jesus gave to us through his passivity, just as the earlier pars of the Gospels describe what Jesus gave to us through his activity.

   Notice that the English word patient also comes from the Latin word passio. After Jesus is arrested he is, in effect, entering hospice, palliative care. And from there, from the place of his dying, he is able to give us something that he could not give through all of his previous activities. This is a mystery,

a gift inside passivity, which many of us have experienced as intangible grace flowing from the beds of our loved ones as they lay dying. Passivity and dying can potentially contain a great gift to others.

   Sadly this is a wisdom we are in danger of losing. Today, within a culture that tends to identify value only with utility, action, and work, it is no secret that more and more people are beginning to speak of euthanasia as death with dignity. What is the value, they ask, of people continuing to live on in hospice when there is no chance of recovery or improvement and they have already slipped away from us consciously? The answer lies in the mystery of passivity, as seen most clearly in Jesus' passion. In his passivity and dying he was able to give us something deeper than what he gave through his strength and activity. This is death with dignity."

Please let us pray for one another that we may spend this Holy Week close to Jesus. I will be back blogging on Easter Sunday.