Palm Sunday Mezze: Prayer, Palm Fronds, & Ma'amoul - Renewing the Right Spirit Within Us
Mezze - المزة - a wide selection of small dishes served as appetizers, including such delicacies as hummus, cheese, eggplant, brains, stuffed grape leaves, calamari, and much more
Good Morning Family, Friends, Colleagues,
It's Palm Sunday.
The most beautiful Christian service I ever witnessed was, years ago, in Cambridge, MA within the walls of The Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a small Episcopal monastery astride the banks of the Charles River.
It was there I was welcomed into the service of Tenebrae, a Service of Shadows, which happens once a year during the Christian Holy Week.
Dark, lighted only by candles, the service was an hour of plainsong chanted psalms and canticles and lessons from Lamentations, divided by moments of profound silence and reflection. The lessons and reflections moved me to more fully understand Prophet Jesus’ teaching that, if one submits, if one focuses one’s attention on God, then “all these things shall be added unto you.”
What will be added, I believe, is a willingness to embrace the poorest, the weakest, the least liberated among us.
What will be added, I have come to believe, is a willingness to understand that liberation is the true path to Justice, Beauty, and Truth.
Spring approaches - very slowly this year in New England - and from my window I see forsythia attempting to blossom. Sharp, pointy green shoots appear through cracks in the earth reaching for the light and promise that soon crocuses and daffodils will emerge.
Hopefully, nearby, near granite steps that lead from the driveway a purple hyacinth, given to my daughter years ago by a friend at an Easter service in upstate New York, will soon reappear.
It is a season of love, of scents, memories, promise, deliverance and liberation, of Moses and Jesus and Muhammad; of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - of all the "Others” of their day - who rose against authority and helped guide their people into the light.
Out of the shadows, into the light.
Last year, on Palm Sunday, I spent part of the afternoon weaving palm fronds brought home to me by friends. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out the weaving pattern, but tearfully, as a familiar form revealed itself, it brought back memories so many decades ago of my father, after returning home after Mass, teaching me and my brothers how to weave palms.
This year - at this moment - I am reminded of times when I didn't feel as vulnerable as I do today. As Ramadan has recently ended, as Passover started last night at sunset, as Holy Week for Christian believers starts today I realize I have been writing about genocide, ethnic cleansing, forced starvation, terrorism, famine and dispossession, especially throughout Occupied Palestine, for well over a year - all with urgency - and that I want to share a different kind of story today.
This morning - as Holy Week for many of you begins - I want to tell you that Jesus is the most revered prophet in Islam after the Prophet Muhammad and that I always feel honored to witness how other believers - and non-believers - celebrate his life.
While theologically the issue of Jesus’ divinity separates Muslims from Christians, there is much we believe and share, knowing that issues of dignity, freedom, non-violence and social justice, infused with love, based in Scripture, form the basis of our human dialogue, as they do with all of good will.
All good things radical preachers bring to our attention and call upon us to witness.
Today, however, I simply want to again share excerpts from childhood memories of beauty which I first shared on Palm Sunday a decade ago and again last year:
Holy Week when I was a kid meant new clothes — soon to be infused with scents of incense after attending Mass in our Eastern Rite church — special cookies, ma’amoul, filled with dates and nuts, tasting of rose water, huge meals and family visits, all while watching adults weaving palm fronds while speaking Arabic, sharing memories of the “old country:”
It's Palm Sunday.
After church, the families gather at our house.
The women gathered, weathered, stout, some stooped, bent from years working in fields, mills, factories. All present. Sitto (grandmother). Aunts. Cousins. Mummy and her sisters. Most still wearing their Sunday best, all wrapped with large aprons, starched, crisp.
The men gathered as well. They always sat in our living room weaving, with calloused hands, fresh palm fronds - which they had brought home after attending mass at Our Lady of the Cedars Church - into traditional delicate designs that would hang over doors for the coming year, smoking cigars, playing cards and drinking unsweetened Arabic coffee made by Mummy, who had to keep tearing herself away from making Ma’amoul - Arab Easter cookies - to keep them happy!
Palm Sunday. Sitto had prepared the dough in advance.
Ready.
Walnuts had been ground, mixed with sugar, and flavored with rose water. Dates had been carefully pitted, then ground though a meat grinder clamped to a sturdy wooden kitchen table. Then reground.
I still have that grinder, attached, for sentimental reasons, to a table in my kitchen.
Card tables were set up and covered with white sheets. Extra chairs had been borrowed.
Everyone had a place.
Everyone was ready.
Time to make Ma’amoul
It was an annual tradition. Women rolling out little discs of dough, others filling them with dates or nuts and folding over the top, forming puffy semi-circles, others carefully crimping the edges and decorating the tops with pierced patterns made with small tin tools Daddy made in his basement workshop.
Late that night, after the Ma’amoul had set a while, Sitto baked them (she wouldn’t trust anyone else to do it) in our ancient green Garland wood-stove, deftly sliding cookies in and out on a wood peel so old and worn I think she might have brought it with her when she emigrated from Syria at the turn of the 20th century.
On Monday the cookies, after having been sprinkled with generous amounts of powdered sugar, would be hand-delivered to each family that had joined us in making them, each getting their share.
I favored the ones with walnuts – their taste lingers still.
In the early 1990s, 1991 maybe – well after I had embraced Islam – I remember being in Cairo and Damascus suqs during a springtime when Easter and Ramadan overlapped. The bazaars were full. Christian shopkeepers welcomed Muslims, Muslim shopkeepers served Christians and richly decorated church candles and Ramadan lanterns competed for space in shop windows. During that Ramadan I was flooded with memories of past Easters with my family – the lingering memories of rose water and walnuts, cigars and coffee, palm fronds and Arabic.
I am flooded today with memories of such salvific stories and so thankful there is still opportunity for me to reaffirm my belief in the Unity that sustains us all.
Lovers of Life, lovers of the Good, gathered together in worship.
Logos in an Easter cookie. Logos in a cup of coffee, a Torah, a Vigil.
Logos.
Alleluia - Praise the Lord.
Alhamdulillah - All Praise be to God.
There were no daffodils and crocuses in Egypt over 3,000 years ago, “in the month of (the) spring,” when the scribes recorded man’s first successful slave rebellion and told us how the Israelites, with God’s help, were freed from slavery; and how Moses led the Exodus of the Israelites out of Egypt and across the Red Sea to Mount Sinai, where he received the Ten Commandments.
By overcoming pharaoh, by triumphing over the powerlessness and hopelessness that tyrants and rulers try to instill in their subjects, the story of the liberation of the Israelites forever inspires humankind with the promise of freedom from oppression.
Alhamdulillah - All Thanks be to God.
The beauty of the Easter story, of Jesus of Nazareth, carpenter, radical, preacher, born of the Virgin Mary and, according to Christian tradition, crucified, died, buried and raised from the dead, is no less inspiring. In challenging authority, in chasing the moneylenders from the temple, in embracing the dispossessed and giving them a promise of salvation we learn, through his sacrifice, that redemption is of the spirit.
Alhamdulillah - All Praise be to God.
Today, we live in an imperfect world where the battle for liberation and freedom is never easy, never over. Achieving social justice for all is a challenge but the examples of the prophets inspire us and compel us to action.
We have learned that we cannot walk alone, that we cannot live as strangers amidst each other. We honor the memories of our forebears and recognize the dignity of all. We have learned that while we speak many languages, many tongues, there is only one truth, and to embrace that truth often requires sacrifice.
As the sun re-warms the earth, as lovers hold hands while strolling along the beach, as robins search for safe places to build a nest, even as teen-agers feel liberated when they get their first driver's license, life constantly challenges us to seek a straight path to freedom and independence.
Move on that straight path toward that light.
Tenebrae ends, I remember, with lines from the fifty-first Psalm: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
Renew the right spirit within us.
Alhamdulillah - All Praise be to God.
Stay strong and resist, loved ones …
Keep your Kaffiyeh tightly wrapped around you.
Salamaat,
Robert
Thank you, Robert, for this beautiful reflection, bringing to mind my childhood
Roman Catholic Holy Week with so many sacred fragrances.
Janet Shea
Thank you for sharing this beautiful reflection. Blessings.