Palm Sunday Reflection

My reflections on this Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025! I attended the Palm Sunday Russian Orthodox service today and had lots of time for quiet reflection, and meditation. These services are loooog, as everything in Russia is long, and the small church was standing room packed! They don’t sit or kneel here in Russia.

So, I sat just outside for two hours just meditating, and not on Jesus’s return to Jerusalem on a donkey. I also sat for another hour or so waiting for two friends to visit with the priest.

My thoughts were all about Trump supporting the Israeli genocide in Palestine. That monster wanting to relocate millions of Palestinians to other countries, and to build a mega real estate development on the Mediterranean Sea. If that wasn’t enough to distract me from the Palm Sunday service, the fact that most Americans have been and are silent in the face of this genocide and monster of a president looking them straight in the eye! Not only am I appalled, but I’m enraged…down right angry.

And then my thoughts turned to the peacemaker president boasting about ending the war in Ukraine…remember, he said on day one he’d end the war. Now he’s threatening both Zelinsky and Putin, even saying he’s pissed and angry with Putin and extending Russian sanctions for one more year. That’s how you make deals! But not with Putin and not with Russia. Putin is playing that kneejerk idiot like an old fiddle and he still thinks he’s got all the cards.

I reminded everyone that it is Putin that is holding all the cards and is not going to make any deal with 47 and I explained why.

I then shifted to US national security enemy #1…CHINA! Gotta pivot back to China and threaten China with a military war AND an economic, tariff war. Meanwhile, the monster in the White House, the wannabe peace president is bombing the hell out of Yemen, and threatening Iran with bombing like they’ve never seen.

Jesus rode the donkey into Jerusalem with palm leaves scattered along the way, only to be crucified on Good Friday. While I marched in procession around the small village with the icon of Jesus riding on a real donkey, and hundreds of parishioners following, I kept wondering if humanity was marching to our own Good Friday and nuclear annihilation.