Celebrations can so beautifully awaken memories, and touch places within you that brought about change within. Traditions and celebrations can be so different, yet they all hold the potential to be incredibly powerful and draw out what is good in our human family, what is that image of God, our Creator that lies within each person.
In our recently Palm Sunday celebration here on the West Coast of British Columbia I was transported back to 2002 where we celebrated Palm Sunday in Pazardzhik, Bulgaria. It was the most glorious Palm Sunday I have ever experienced, and the wonder of it is still strong as I hold the memories.
I had travelled to Bulgaria with a team of women from Linwood House Ministries where we visited various cities in that country. There was an air of oppression permeating life there. The only way I can describe what I have experienced in the Post Communist Eastern European countries I have visited is that it felt like the soul of these places had been anaesthetized. Walking down main streets there was little laughter, little colour in buildings inside or out, very little vegetation of any sort, and things that were broken had not been repaired. Women especially seemed to wear a veil of despair, wrapped tightly around them removing their inner passion, removing their innate feminine sensuality. They had spent so many years in a political system that demanded they suppress their own nature so that their unique gender qualities almost became lost within their soul. These people who had so little generously opened their homes for us to stay with them. My friend Carol and I stayed with an elderly couple who had no heat, no hot water and very limited running water. This sweet elderly lady would bring each of us a beer bottle of hot water each evening (she had boiled the water) and this was our water for bathing. This selfless hospitality is imprinted deeply on my soul.
On Palm Sunday we attended one of the local churches to celebrate with them. This was the first Sunday I had experienced this kind of celebration in a faith community. As I write I step back into that place. It was a large church with broken windows, no heating, old wooden benches, cold cement floor, and no colours whatsoever inside it, and all conversations echoed through the building. It seemed bleak, foreboding, and so harsh. Yet that was the structure. The people were warm and loving and so eager for you to experience their homes, their life, their faith, in an exuberant way that was totally beyond the sparseness, and the harshness of the environment. From a tiny room in the back with a two burner hob, food was brought in and prepared and at long wooden tables at the back of the church we ate our meals in community as a team of travellers with our hosts, the pastor and his family. This was a culture, a society, where tenderness and compassion had been dispensed with and in its place a hardness had gripped its soul. These were people of faith who had paid the price of isolation and persecution to believe in Jesus and to live out a life of faith. They were learning how to live out a life where you could love openly and this was a painful journey for them. We could see their pain, but looking back I realize we had no idea of their struggle to break out of the constricting bonds of oppression, and to walk, live, love, laugh and embrace this new fledgeling freedom in their current political climate combine with continued poverty. They were learning the difficult journey of trusting that love will set you free, truth will set you free. We are all on this road together to freedom.
With all this background, what made that particular Palm Sunday 2002 so awesome? Even to write that there are tears in my eyes because I experienced Holy Awe that day. There was standing room only and our little group of women did not speak Bulgarian and only a few on them spoke English. We stood together raising our voices in two languages singing together songs that renewed hope, that acknowledge pain and suffering, that reminded us that we all loved the God who never forgets any of us, and that Jesus was the One who could see us all and love us well. The only way I can describe what I felt that day is that it was as if the roof of this old broken structure was gently lifted off and the Glory of God, a powerful peace, a sense of love that made all of life seem to be just as it should be at that moment, and a sense of oneness with this whole community and the presence of the Holy One was tangible within me and around me. Never before had Holy Presence felt so exhilarating and filling as in that moment on a Palm Sunday, thousands of miles from home, in a church that was so different from my own faith experience. It is a piece of time that is a solid rock point in my walk with the Almighty.
As I write of it in 2010 I can see the faces of all age groups enjoying this Sunday that start of a Holy Week in our Christian faith. I remember them and hold them in the Light. I remember this precious piece of my own faith walk with Jesus and the opening of my soul to celebrating in a new way. I remember the group of women who didn’t know each other that travelled together for an adventure with God.
