About My Brilliant Mistakes
This is the blog of Cynthia Closkey — web designer, writer, and all-around swell gal.
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Palm-igami
Monday, 05 April 2004 05:52 PM
For Catholics and lapsed Catholics in the audience: a Budding Young Theologian, a new featured columnist at Zulkey.com, considers whether it's sacrilegious to fold, spindle, or mutilate the palm fronds distributed at Palm Sunday Mass.
First, I have to say, in all my many years attending Catholic Mass, I’ve never seen the “Jesus on donkey” fronds-folding. I cannot give you instructions for making it come out right. Nor can I give you instructions for the “Palm Cross.” In my family, we always returned from Church after Palm (Passion) Sunday Mass and immediately slid the long palm strip, unfolded, under the mattresses of our beds. Occasionally, we would bend (never fold) the palm into a circle, and tuck the ends behind a crucifix that hung on the wall in my parents’ bedroom. The ends (one pointy, one flat) would stick out the sides, just beneath Jesus’ right and left arms. It would stay like that all year, until a few weeks before Lent started, when we would return the fronds to the church, where they would be burned for the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday.
This question came up in my childhood as well. It never occured to me to try to create anything other than a cross from the palm fronds. Perhaps this demonstrates a lack of artistic imagination in my young mind. I did worry whether one should be allowed to crease the palm fronds. Was that like chewing on the Communion host? What did Vatican II have to say on the matter? It's significantly more challenging to create a recognizable cross with a palm frond if you do not allow yourself to crease the leaf.
As years passed I became less concerned about the matter, and apparently the rest of my family did as well, or perhaps it never concerned them. These days you can find folded and drying palm fronds tucked into the storage areas of my mother's and father's cars or even scrunched under the floor mats.
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