Palm Sunday was one of the few days of the year my mother went to Mass. I don’t recall ever going with her, but I do recall the way she’d carefully drape her palms around her statue of the Blessed Virgin in what passed as our dining room. (Never mind that we never ate in there unless we were sitting at the kids’ table at Thanksgiving.)
My first churched Palm Sunday as an adult was 2006. I remember it best for my utter emotional collapse, complete with tears and sobbing, when we got to the part in the readings when Christ gave up the spirit and we all knelt. How did he do it, find that place of faith and trust amid all the pain and separation? How much did he know and when did he know it? Where did his godliness protect him… and where did his humanness strip him bare?
I have various other religious paraphernalia these days: tons of spiritual reading material. 
A statue of Mary, standing on a globe and crushing a serpent’s head. A statue of the Child Jesus, formed from volcanic ash from Mount Pinatubo. But every day when I first get up and when I go to bed, it’s a cross of palms I look to. I attached it to a sprinkler in my bedroom, figuring that in an emergency the water would either dissolve the palms or my physical life would be in such jeopardy that I’d need the cross more than the spray.
And so, as Holy Week begins, I think how I am like my mother. I need those palms. They are a daily, tangible reminder of what Christ did… and of the things I need to do.
