HAIRSHIRT 

        Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery

 
.

 

 

 

 

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

Sunday, April 09, 2006

 

Palm Down

I know the story behind the Easter season. I know what most of the important days of Lent leading up to the Big Resurrection Jubilee are meant to symbolize. I know the general rituals of season. But there's something I have never, ever understood about one particular day in this whole Jesuspalooza.

When you go to church on Palm Sunday, the day we celebrate people throwing palms on the ground in front of Jesus and his donkey, they give you a palm frond. I saw people walking around with them everywhere I went today. I remember being a kid and receiving one when we'd go to Palm Sunday services in the Lutheran church where my sister had catechism. I know what the palms are supposed to represent and all. What I don't know is this: what the hell are you supposed to do with the friggin' frond once you leave church?

A you meant to find some really Christy-looking person and toss your frond in front of them? Should you use it to tickle any non-believers into submission? Are you supposed to weave it into a little palm husk craft project of some kind? I remember playing with it for about twenty minutes--maybe hitting my sister with it a few times--and then forgetting it existed until I found it weeks later and finally threw it away.

Why the hell do people need to take these things from the church? My guess is that it's a cross-promotional deal the churches worked out with the floral industry decades ago. I think it'd be a whole lot more environmentally responsible if the congregation were given whole palm trees to plant someplace. Think how much oxygen we'd be putting back into the atmosphere if every Christian around the world planted a tree once a year. New rain forests would sprout up.

So, Pope Whatsyerbutt, I call upon you to steer your church in a new and more ecologically-minded direction. Forget the frond! Plant a tree in Jesus' name. Amen.

Comments:
In PR, they origami'd the thing into a cross, and used it to decorate their rear-view mirrors for the next year.
 
Post a Comment



<< Home

 

 
Links

 

 
           
     
    
.