Translating Anger into Action: Palm Sunday
Call To Action's 2023 Lenten Calendar is a collaboration between the Anti-Racism Team (ART) and Indigenous Solidarity Collective. This calendar provides more than 40 days of prayer and study to guide our discernment of racial justice and lead us into solidarity with Indigenous communities. For each Sunday and holy day during Lent, we'll publish a reflection from an ART or Indigenous Solidarity Collective member. Following the reflection, we’ll feature a call to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada as well as discussion questions for your own meditation.
Palm Sunday: April 2, 2023
“Then he said to them: ‘My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch with me.’”
When I was a teenager, I would enter Holy Week full of sadness. I left Palm Sunday Mass with my head down, the prickly palms draped over my shoulders. I gathered my sins for Confession. I practiced fasting. On Holy Thursday and Good Friday, I volunteered at a nursing home, a soup kitchen, and a halfway house thrift shop in Trenton, New Jersey.
I admit that it was performative—both the sadness and these corporal works of mercy. I had to make myself feel what was coming for Jesus. These acts of service functioned as penance, but was I truly living these corporal works of mercy? Did I only volunteer because I wanted to earn the “role” of Mary in our church’s acclaimed Living Stations production?
I did receive the role of Mary during my senior year of high school. On the portable wood platform affixed to the altar, I knelt at the foot of the cross with my hands clasped and head hung low. At 17, I didn’t have the world-weariness of Mary or the understanding of what it would feel like to lose your child. It was 2006 and I was a sheltered girl in the New Jersey suburbs, where we thought war, poverty, abuse, and addiction wouldn’t touch us. Another performance.
This Palm Sunday, I’m not so sad. Like many of us, I'm metabolizing anger and exhaustion. I’m no longer so sheltered; I’ve had my fair share of loss, abuse, and addiction. These days, you can’t escape the world if you tried.
Palm Sunday, and the Passion narrative of Matthew’s Gospel, is not about finding refuge—at least, that’s not the most obvious analysis. Jesus is again out in the public, but he is not a free man. He is angry and distressed. In the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells Peter: "My soul is sorrowful even to death. Remain here and keep watch with me” (Mt 26:38).
We know Peter and the others fail to keep watch. Peter will later publicly deny Jesus three times. Jesus’ disciples—all except the women—will retreat at certain times. And Jesus himself will feel betrayed by our Creator, his father, while dying on the cross.
This Palm Sunday, I’m drawn to these moments of retreat, silence, and mourning. Jesus praying in Gethsemane. Peter weeping when he understands the depth of his denial. Mary Magdalene sitting outside the tomb, staring at the stone. There’s anger burning in all of them.
Whenever I think about anger, I call upon our foremother Audre Lorde. In her speech “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Lorde describes how we live with anger out of fear—fear of naming it, feeling it, voicing it. Fear of the changes that may come from all these acts. Fear of others’ anger—especially the anger of those most marginalized. “My fear of anger taught me nothing,” Lorde said. “Your fear of that anger will teach you nothing, also.”
Lorde argues that formulating our anger into direct action is a “painful process” of “translation,” because it requires us to “identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.” We aren’t meant to identify with Jesus in the Passion narrative. Nor are we meant to be angry at a group of people, Pilate, or the Romans. We are his disciples. And though each disciple who fled or betrayed Jesus out of fear will eventually be forgiven, it was not without this “painful process” of translating their anger.
The older I become, the more I identify with Mary Magdalene, staring at the closed tomb. What was Mary Magdalene thinking? Did she, too, feel betrayed—like it was all for naught? Was she angry, and how did she translate this anger, alone in Jerusalem?
On Easter Sunday, an angel will appear to Mary Magdalene outside Jesus’ empty tomb and ask: Woman, why are you weeping?
But we are not there yet. We are Mary Magdalene, still feeling through our anger and figuring out its many uses. We are taking refuge but we are not retreating. We are keeping watch with those who are not yet free. We are not without our fears, but we remain.
—This Palm Sunday reflection was written by Lauren Barbato. Lauren is currently CTA’s communications coordinator and a member of the Indigenous Solidarity Collective.
Discussion Questions
Which disciple of the Passion narrative do you identify with?
What scares you about anger, including your own anger? How do you begin to “translate” your anger?
How does this Passion narrative call us to become co-conspirators in dismantling racism and oppression?
Suggestions for Almsgiving
As part of your Lenten practice, please consider donating to one or more of the following organizations:
About the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
Between 2007 and 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada recorded the testimonies of more than 6,000 First Nations people across Canada either directly or indirectly affected by the residential school system. In June 2015, the commission released a final report with 94 calls to action directed at the Canadian government. The final 52 calls to action focus on reconciliatory policy implementation for the dismantling of systemic racism against Indigenous Peoples in Canada.
Call to Action 86
Media and Reconciliation
86. We call upon Canadian journalism programs and media schools to require education for all students on the history of Aboriginal peoples, including the history and legacy of residential schools, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Treaties and Aboriginal rights, Indigenous law, and Aboriginal– Crown relations.
