For Catholics, Palm Sunday marks the end Lent and serves as a reminder of Jesus' triumphant entrance to Jerusalem. Every year, churches are full of parishioners–among whom I count myself–eager to receive a blessed palm. As you know well, I grew up in a practicing Catholic family, who obeyed and respected the church's mandates.
One of the few catholic traditions that I respect and enjoy is the end of the Lent celebration. I feel that I'm somehow bringing or renewing God 's presence in my home by making the small cross with the blessed branch and mounting it to my house's front door. Is the blessed palms cross a placebo? Well, probably, because if God is powerful and omnipotent we do not need a palm cross in the door so that He can be in our homes–but I love the symbolism anyway.
When I think about Palm Sunday, it immediately transportsme back to my childhood. I think about the long walks from our house in Venezuela to the church and how I tightly clutched my grandmother's hand.
Her hands were rough from all the clothes they had washed and from all the hard work she'd done without gloves or moisturizing lotions, but for me they were the most tender and sweet hands in the world.
My grandmother's hands were full of freckles and age spots and veins. She always had her nails painted because she was very concerned about her appearance, very feminine. For me, my grandmother's hands were a synonym for protection and tenderness. They fed to us, my brother and I, they tucked us in at night and they made the blessed palm crosses for us every year. When I decided to live by myself, I continued attending church every Palm Sunday to look for my blessed palm, and when it was my turn to make my cross, I closed my eyes, remembered my grandmother's hands doing it and mentally followed her steps.
I have tried to do the same with my children. Although I want to give them freedom to make their own decisions about faith and religiousness, Palm Sunday 's tradition is an important one for our family. It is one of those days we can tell each other, without words, how much we love each other; it is like a miraculous materialization of the love. Why I am calling it miraculous?
Because I believe in the miracles, the great ones and the ones that happened every day–like the year in which we found Luis in the plaza.
Leaving church one Palm Sunday years ago with my grandmother, she took us to buy ice cream at the plaza because she used to love to spoil us. In the middle of all the childish jubilation, we heard a different kind of noise. We began to sharpen our ears, until we saw it: in a tree branch there was a parrot. Yes, a parrot. My grandmother wondered: "How did this regal parrot end up in here?"
My brother and I began to shout at the small parrot.
My grandma looked sad so and we asked, "What is it abuelita?"
"It's that when I had the same age as you, I found a small parrot like that in the fields and I named it Luis. I don't know. I just remembered that," she answered nostalgic and lost in her childhood memories.
After a little while we left the park. That evening when we got home, we heard a noise that came from a very high and large window at my house–it was the parrot!
My brother and I began shouting again, but it didn't get scared. It took him, but eventually he came in and don't you know that parrot soon made our house its home. We named him Luis and he lived with us for fourteen years.
Everytime someone would knock at the door Luis shouted "Who is it?"
He was always right alongside my grandmother at all times and acted more like a small dog than a tropical bird. When Luis died, I was already a young lady but we cried for him as if someone in the family had passed. When we were digging a grave in the garden to bury him, my grandma, with her eternal wisdom, told us: "Do not cry for Luis. He was a gift that God gave to us on a Palm Sunday, so he was an angel with feathers and his time to return to heaven has come."
I believed in her. Our parrot was an angel with feathers who made us laugh. He learned all the bad words that my brother and I secretly taught him and he would blurt them out on the most inconvenient moments when we had visitors. In the afternoons he also requested crackers from my grandmother constantly and he brightened up our life.
I only hope that God also gifts my children their own miracle in the form of a Palm Sunday's pet.
Image via germeister/flickr
