All Hail The King!!!

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So, today took quite the turn I wasn’t expecting. For Catholics all over the world, today is the observation of Palm Sunday. It’s simply called Palm Sunday. According to the Church’s teachings, it’s the day that Jesus Christ was welcomed into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey. While everyone hailed him as the King of Kings. He did this knowing fully well that he was going to die soon.

In commemoration of that glorious event, Catholics observe it annually. They take palms and go through the streets in their areas, singing songs of praise and worship, showing the world that Jesus is King. This is something that I grew up with, it has been a part of my life. Going for the procession and basically having me a nice spiritual exercise. It didn’t change when I went to school.

However, it did change when Covid-19 hit. You see, everyone was locked up in their homes, many people couldn’t even leave their homes. As expected, places of worship weren’t frequented that much. By the time we were released, so many things had changed. And one of them was the procession. In my parish, we had to stop doing the procession on the streets and simply do it in the church compound. That wasn’t nearly as fun as going around the neighborhood, but what mattered was the spiritual exercise.

You see, the thing is, we’re now in big 2025, the pandemic is now far behind us. I thought that the procession was back in vogue. For some reason, I believed that my parish here had observed it in the usual way last year. I don’t even know why I believed that. So, I thought that there would be a major procession today and we’d go from street to street as usual.

Well, I was wrong. They still did it in the compound. And that was a bummer because I’m sure we could have done it on the streets and it would have been awesome. It was quite fast and it didn’t even take up to ten minutes and mass was back in session.

Note though, this does not mean that processions are a thing of the past when it comes to the Catholic Church. They’re still very much in vogue, but only for select programs, making them happen fewer each year. We’re now in the Holy Week, and it’ll culminate in Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday.

On Good Friday, we get to dramatize the Passion of Christ, as I've mentioned in a previous post. That will also include a procession where we go through the Stations of The Cross on the streets of the neighborhood. This is something that I’m going to be a part of on that day, and I’m kinda looking forward to it.

So, what can I say? This week is getting off to a good start. I’m just hoping that my work would be able to allow me to make time for drama rehearsals this week. Because these are the final days before the main event on Friday. And with a blink of an eye, it’ll all be done and dusted.

Easter is coming guys… are you ready for the festivities that come with?

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_{Thank you for reading. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, I would love to know what you’re thinking. Till we meet in the next post.}

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_{N.B: All images used in this post are mine. The thumbnail was designed using Canva.}

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