Palm Sunday

Last time I went to the supermarket, some of the kids from school were loitering in the foyer with strange woven things laid out in rows on the ground. I asked them what they were, and they explained incredulously that they were rameaux of course, to decorate the house. I didn’t know the word, but assumed they were for Palm Sunday. They had the little crosses that we have back home too, but I had never seen palm leaf sculptures before, except for once in Florence where a Chinese man was making crickets and butterflies for the tourists. These Corsican ones were abstract, leaving the fronds intact and attached to the stem, and I bought one for 5 euros, which seemed more than fair given how intricate it was. One of the boys, a little troublemaker with an endearing sense of humour, descended on the girls and started telling them off for charging ‘la prof d’anglais’. Then I went to do my shopping, and on my way out, he offered me a free sculpture of his own, holding it out gallantly with a flourish, but then mumbling and backing off shyly when I thanked him.

I took them home and hung them up. The internet tells me that they keep the leaves pale yellow by tying up the branches at the heart of the palm months before, to stop photosynthesis and give them the pale colour symbolising purity. The plaited palms are called palmes tressées, and the custom only seems to be common here, in Nice, and in parts of Southern Italy. It seems poetic, to take such trouble over a branch symbolizing those to be thrown in Christ’s path, or nowadays, to be kept all year and brought into Church on Ash Wednesday and burned to mark the congregations’ foreheads.

This video, from the 1960s, shows Palm Sunday in Ajaccio and so much is the same: old men in flat caps, palm sellers around the town square nimbly weaving the leaves into the little crosses for last minute customers, and everyone gathering around the priest to have the branches ‘bathed’ (they use the word 'baigner') in holy water.


We went down to the church and hung around until they announced that the procession would start at the seashore. Lots of children I teach were there, several of them selling plaited palms in the church square, and many more dressed in approximations of Biblical dress – the boys like little monks, the girls like brides in white dresses and veils. I knew most of the altar servers too, and it was funny to see them so solemn and well behaved, wielding the censer and turning the pages for the priest. The effect was slightly ruined by their nikes or converse peeping out from the white robes. We trooped out to the sea just across the square, a huge crowd, the children sang a song and we all walked back to the church steps with our armfuls of greenery and raised them in the air while the priest scattered us with holy water. It was a little anticlimactic really – I had been hoping for a proper procession round the town like the one for the immaculate conception, but we went into church and listened through a long rendition of the Easter story in which the priest lost his place and had to be prompted several times by an increasingly frantic old woman: ‘And Jesus SAID…!?’

There were no hymns, just a quavery voiced choir of old women, which seemed sad since the church was packed. But a man behind us took it upon himself to sing every word in a beautiful baritone. Some of my students, Marie, Marie, Fanny, Léa and Melissa, were lined up in the front row looking lovely in their dresses and veils, whispering surreptitiously and preening whenever the photographer from the mairie turned his zoom lens towards them. Poignant and terrible, with all these cases of child abuse in the news, to see how much children often adore religion: the responsibility, the chance to dress up and be the centre of attention, the colour and pomp and singing.

I hadn’t really thought before about how the reformation must have split communities, which until then had all come together to worship. As a Catholic in England, you just don’t get that sense of meeting almost everyone in the town in church on a Sunday. I love exchanging the sign of peace: the old man sitting alone behind me smiled so warmly when I turned to shake his hand: they say ‘La paix du Christ’ instead of ‘Peace be with you’ – so that in French the exchange is implicit and the peace explicitly Christ’s. It must have been interesting, translating the Latin mass into all the vernaculars – there must be studies on the different nuances.

I was struck by several things as I stood there through the long mass, letting the familiar but unfamiliar words wash over me in a new language. Shamefully, I had never realised that when you accept the sacrifice of the bread and wine, you say ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed’. Throughout years of Catholic school, catechism and church I had always managed to mishear it as ‘I shall be here’! Some things become much clearer in a different language. It’s strange, as an atheist, how emotive I find religious services – thinking of Mary, so young herself, watching her child taunted and killed as he willingly gave up his life made me well up. Looking around at the kitsch, pastel-coloured statues waiting to be hidden for Holy Week I saw how powerful it is to have the whole of Christian time represented all at once: the Nativity, the marble statue of Christ kneeling for baptism, his slim waist and fragile ribcage in the crucifixion, his pale body in the glass coffin like Snow White, Mary crowned and triumphant in heaven, and then all the saints, bringing the story into France and almost into the present with Joan of Arc, Bernadette of Lourdes, Teresa of Lisieux.

This post has been Catholictastic! I'm sorry if I lost you there. Here is Saint Augustine, doing what he does best - nunc stans, the eternal present:

“Who will hold [the heart] and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendour of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable…but that all the while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.”

Confessions XI, 11, 13