Palm Sunday

Sitting in the sunrise, morning light elongating the shadow of my pen on paper. Warmth and searing brightness; too fierce to look at, the sun is an indirect presence.

What else do we experience as emanating from an unseen, or unseeable, object? Love, certainly. It’s very nature is not to require the source of love and the beloved to exist in the same time and space to experience its force.

Is that not part of the message of the gospels? That God’s love is not confined to discrete spaces? Divinity knows no restraint. It flows in myriad and unexpected streams. And we find in each other and through the rhythms and seasons of liturgy a place where the rising sun casts shadows on our lives, evidence of the necessary interplay between dawn and dusk.

The moments were we see in a mirror darkly are juxtaposed with fleeting glimpses of clarity. And the cycle continues of holding in the space of one breath the expectation of joy and the anticipation of loss. We raise our palms in hope and praise knowing that this road of jubilation leads into the heart of sorrow. We hold in our hearts the tension of both becoming and of unraveling. We learn to lean into expectation while also preparing to let go — to sink, when needed, into life’s contradictions, embracing the sorrow that is love’s long shadow.