Palm Crosses

A Christian online resource has just emailed to offer to sell me palm crosses, and it startled me because once again, I find myself moving through Lent without giving it much thought. I wanted to make it more of a pilgrimage this year, but one thing or another intervened and I never got myself organised with focused Lenten meditations or readings, and already we’re looking ahead to Palm Sunday.

I do like the aspect in some church traditions of having liturgical seasons, so that every Sunday one is reminded by the colours of the hangings even, what season it is. Maybe I’m just flighty but I kind of need frequent reminders.

As a teenager, every Lent was marked by one or two sessions of folding palm fronds into crosses to give out on Palm Sunday. I folded so many over those years that I can still perform the intricate folding today. In Scotland palm fronds are hard to come by, so I used to use heavy paper to do it with children in Sunday school. But now you can buy them online and save yourself the bother of folding them.

My memories of the folding of the crosses was not that it was a tedious task but that it was fun to chat and laugh with others as we mindlessly got on with it. Like worries, which once shared are halved, so work like this seems less onerous if done in company.

I say mindlessly got on with it, but actually there were moments when the very act of folding the straight frond into a cross reminded me of just what Jesus did for me. It’s weird that Christians have a symbol which was an instrument of torture, but that symbol means so much. 

Jesus took up the cross, though he was pure and holy, because I am not. He bled and suffered unspeakable horrors and died so that I might live. 

I want to remember that as I walk through the next few weeks of Lent. I want to sense a proper appreciation and respect for his sacrifice. I want to stand with him, symbolically, as we remember his humiliation, his scourging, his crucifixion, so that the full implications of Resurrection Day hit me. 

I can’t say thank you enough to him.