Palm Sunday
Love's Humble Power
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“Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey…” —Matthew 21:5
MEDITATION
Jesus’ life of compassion, non-violence, forgiveness, and selfless sacrifice created radically new ways of thinking about God’s power and dominion. For early Saints, forgiveness, mercy, selflessness, humility—these were not temporary expedients for surviving in a hostile Roman empire; they were the authentic way of emulating and acquiring “the divine nature.” Jesus was not just showing the way; he was the way.
—Terryl Givens, “The Fullness of God”
ACTIVITY
Make your own palm fronds by folding a piece of construction paper along the diagonal and make slanted cuts along the doubled edge. Write one of Jesus Christ’s kingly attributes on each leaf. Display your palm fronds in a window or on your front door.
ESSAY
A Careful Mending of the World: The Creative Work of Hope
By Paige Anderson
Suffering abounds. This we all know. When a longtime friend unexpectedly lost her sister—the only family she had in the faraway state in which she lived, and on the heels of her father’s passing—my heart was broken and my hands felt impotent. What could I possibly do to ease her suffering?
Lehi taught his sons, and us, that the reality of suffering enables the duality of joy and sorrow. Curiously, however, to begin his discourse on suffering and redemption, he starts at the Creation. As he describes the creation of the fowls, the beasts, and our first parents, “the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are” (2 Ne. 2:14), I am reminded that the Creation story ends with a command to do. Continue His creative work by creating. The Lord tells His people to go forth and "to dress [this garden] and to keep it" (Gen. 2:15). The command seems to foreshadow the ongoing repair that would soon be required by this newly fallen world.
In Ecclesiastes, the command to create is reiterated: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest” (Ecc. 9:10). I sense an urgency in those words that seem to recognize that the needs we see will go beyond our hands’ ability to aid before we return to dust. There is so much to do. Engage in this careful mending however you can and meet the suffering you see with ready hands, the Ecclesiastical preacher seems to implore. “Do it with thy might,” he says. As Latter-day Saints, we are even covenantally bound to mourn with those that mourn, to knit our aching hearts to theirs, to stitch the suffering world back together.
A friend introduced me to a Jewish concept that encapsulates all this. It both fascinates and inspires me. Tikkun olam refers to the ongoing act of repairing the world. To me, this repair implies the need for creation. We believe that even the creation of our world was a refashioning of existing elements. Our own creative efforts come in the form of gathering in what we see around us—the broken, disparate bits—and making something that speaks to wholeness. Tikkun olam recognizes that the world is full of brokenness, and it also acknowledges that humans can participate in small acts of repair that bring newness and wholeness to what was once broken.
I love to think of creation in its many forms as many acts of healing repair. It is a hopeful thought that though my efforts are meager when compared to the magnitude of sorrow I see, somehow, someway, my small acts of creation are able to reverberate outward—contributing to a greater wholeness. I am inspired when I think of creative work as holy work.
The definition of “holy” as offered by Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom is beautiful in its piercing simplicity: Holiness means imitating God. It’s almost too simple, isn’t it? Holiness means imitating God. But as I contemplate God’s command to dress this garden, the Jewish concept of repairing the world, and the Ecclesiastes charge to do with might, I am struck with clarity of purpose: be a creator.
Milgrom says holiness is “that which humanity is commanded to emulate and approximate.” Revealing the hand of the Creator through our own acts of creation seems like a good step toward approximating this holiness. When I am making, I feel the spark of the divine in me. I feel the memory of learning to mimic my Father as I approximate His ways and seek to be like Him. I relate closely to what famed author Madeleine L’Engle says about her feelings when she listens to music by Johann Sebastian Bach: “Bach’s music points me to wholeness, a wholeness of body, mind, and spirit, which we seldom glimpse, but which we are intended to know. It is no coincidence that the root word of whole, health, heal, holy, is hale (as in hale and hearty.) If we are healed, we become whole; we are hale and hearty; we are holy.”
Creative work is holy work. It is repairing-to-make-whole work. It is sometimes the only work my hands know to do when all around me feels in chaos and despair. We must acknowledge that sometimes the needs we see are far beyond the scale of any two hands. But where does that reality leave willing hands that cannot find a way to do much of anything that feels consequential?
In addition to the suffering I saw in my friend, I saw suffering spilling from newspaper headlines and social media feeds, war and divisiveness further wounding a wounded world. I had willing hands that frequently found themselves clasped in prayer. “What can my hands do?” I asked.
I remembered a 2022 Facebook post that American author Anne Lamott wrote about the stunningly unnecessary beauty of springtime and how simply bearing witness to these small beauties can affect the world. She wrote, “In 68 years, I have never seen a boring sky. I have never felt blasé about the moon, or birdsong, or paper whites. It is a crazy drunken clown college outside our windows now, almost too much beauty and renewal to take in. The world is warming up.” She goes on, “Well, how does us appreciating spring help the people of Ukraine? If we believe in chaos theory, and the butterfly effect, that the flapping of a Monarch’s wings near my home can lead to a weather change in Tokyo, then maybe noticing beauty—flapping our wings with amazement—changes things in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It means goodness is quantum. Even to help the small world helps. Even prayer, which can seem to do nothing. Everything is connected.”
And so my time in the studio became a near-constant prayer. Words to ancient hymns came to my mind. I sang them out loud in an empty house as a form of invocation, hoping somehow the music and message would be winged across the country on the back of a prayer meant to bring a measure of peace. I looked and listened for every divine spark and tried to use it to make a tender flame of hope and comfort. Rabbi Isaac Luria taught that our job “is to find those divine sparks, select them, and reconnect them to their original, higher purpose. . . . How do we find those sparks? Simply by doing those same activities, but in a way that reveals a higher, divine meaning.” Rabbi Tzvi Freeman concludes that “Each tikkun has the potential to change everything.” My tikkun in those moments became the only thing I could find to do with my hands in the face of immense and faraway suffering: clasp them and pray mightily. It was a small, but hopeful, creative act.
I’m a believer that creative acts can begin by digging into the mundane. It is only through constant daily re-creation that the world is transformed. The reality is that we cannot live outside the world. We are bound by the dailiness of feeding, sleeping, caring, and cleaning. The Mishnah teaches that “each person is an entire world” and any improving act made within a person reverberates, a bit like the butterfly effect described by Lamott, through the rest of the world. Divine creation must begin with the ordinary. After all, didn’t the Holy One of Israel have an ordinary upbringing, live in an ordinary town, and have to fill his life with the ordinary rhythms of mortality too? So that must be where our pressing calls to do and to create arise from.
The work of bringing wholeness to the world is grounded in living in the world. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might. My hands are most often found, in my little world, in the near-constant care of young children. Do it with thy might. I wake them, help them dress, brush their hair, my hands on their heads like a blessing. Time for breakfast. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do . . . I prepare food, help with last-minute shoes, papers, signed reading logs, lunches, and backpacks . . . do it with thy might. I walk them to school. This is holy work? It is the pressing work before me. It is creating hale and hearty children. It is leading to whole lives that are full. It is demanding and creative. It requires constant attention and careful repair. Mistakes are made in abundance, but so are efforts at restoration. This is holy work.
A month after her sister’s passing, I texted my friend: “Thinking of you today. I hope your heavy heart has found moments of lightness during the past month. Even though Christmas is over, I can’t seem to get ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’ out of my head. There is so much long, dark winter ahead.” Wave upon wave of crashing sorrows continue. Darkness and brokenness persist. And so too does our call to “do with might” the many acts of repair ahead of us, as we participate in the holy work of creating a world that is whole.
“Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.”
Paige Crosland Anderson is an artist painting patterns while exploring notions about daily ritual, routine, and the creation of meaning through repeated acts.
Art by Paige Crosland Anderson.