Palm Sunday

Next week is Easter, which means just one week until my Spring Break. I’m looking forward to heading to Greece (Athens and the island of Crete) especially since Easter is their biggest religious holiday. It will be nice to be somewhere where the holiday is actually celebrated, rather than having to construct some semblance of a celebration myself. Being the Sunday before Easter today I went to mass to celebrate Palm Sunday. Now, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. After all, my experiences in foreign countries around Easter have been quite varied. But I did expect palms. I at least know that parts of Turkey have palm trees. Silly me. As soon as I go making assumptions I’m sure to be proven wrong.

I arrived at church just in time to be told to proceed outside for the start of the service. Ok, that’s fairly typical. Only instead of blessing palms, our priest was praying to “bless these branches.” That’s because we didn’t have palms. Instead we had a very large clump of olive branches. Why not? After all, the story of the agony in the garden occurs on the Mount of Olives. Olive branches have some significance, especially if you can’t have palm fronds. So after the branches are blessed and we had all received our branch of varying size (I saw a kid with a branch that was at least half as tall as him, while my companion received what basically amounts to a sprig) we turned to process back into the church. Only here I recognized the West African influence brought into the congregation by our Nigerian priest and participants. We didn’t just sedately walk in as I would normally do in the states. No, to accompany the choir we were singing and (some of us were) waving the olive branches enthusiastically above our heads. It reminded me of the 2 km procession I did in Koundara the first year I was in Guinea which could have definitely been considered a celebration of Palm Sunday. The rest of mass was “normal,” but today has definitely made me wonder what I’ll experience when I try to celebrate Easter next week.