Palm Sunday – an opportunity for review and renewal

Mar 28, 2021 Editorial

---

Kaieteur News – For many, today is just an ordinary day. For many more, it is a special day graced with extraordinary sacredness, an unfathomable pull of rare force that comes from way above our heads and takes up residence deep within ourselves, through the indefinable that makes us think along certain lines, walk a certain road, and live a certain outstanding kind of life. It is Palm Sunday and Phagwah being observed and hailed in Guyana today, and today we speak of Palm Sunday and its importance, with the festival of Phagwah reserved for tomorrow.
Two thousand years ago, a humble figure set out on a journey in an unknown, backwater place in the vast Roman Empire. He was a humble man, who did strange things to those who came into contact with him: he touched them and moved them to be different and live a different way of life. He touched them so much that they were willing to give up their very lives because of the profound spirit he instilled in them. When he was gone from this earthly pale, many of them were called upon to take a stand for what they believed in as taught by and exemplified by this same man. Then, they stood up in faithful and fearless belief, even when it meant that they would have to pay the harshest price for their devoted stance. That is, with their very lives.
The man himself was a nobody, a mere poor carpenter’s son. But set out on his fateful journey he did on that Palm Sunday with one objective in mind: to give up himself willingly and self-sacrificingly in the face of whatever was to come. And it was sure to come, as was prophesied and it was his destiny. It was sure to come also because of the known cruelties of the Roman occupation forces, which had inserted overpowering fears wherever they were present; and because of the deep abiding hatred he incurred from the so-called men of God in his time. But forward he went, because for him there was no other way, and this was regardless of what lay ahead. He was a leader who led by example; he was a man who never asked his followers, those who believed in him, to do anything that he would not do, that he did not do himself. Because he was that way all the time and all the way, people followed him even unto death.
Now, this is the kind of leaders we need in this country called Guyana, but which we are yet to find. If only we could get one – one leader – who represented in the fullness of his impeccable essence, all that is humble, truthful and trustworthy, then we would be better as individuals, as a people, as a society. If only we could get near to one leader of the substances that spoke to credibility, sincerity and honesty, then we would have a different way of life that flourishes in this country, in all of its teeming urban locales, and its far rustic villages. But we don’t; not one of them, which not a single one of us would be so reckless and so senseless to step forward and claim that we do.
On the other hand, and this is what should register with those who believe and those who don’t also. The man from Galilee came out of a nowhere place, called and embraced as his companions, those who were dismissed as nobodies, and from nothing with those nobodies as his messengers and instruments remade the world then and in which we live today. It was started way before Palm Sunday, but the unwavering direction taken and what was journeyed towards came to its climax with the start that was embarked upon on that long ago Sabbath.
He changed the world: speak to truth and the same truth will set you free. We wish that our leaders and their people when they read this will get some flash of light, some spirit moving them, which tells them that they are not speaking to truth. They do not speak anything of truth, but what is the opposite of it on most occasions and on most issues that come before them, including the large and small; but especially the large, because it makes for big money all too easily gained.
That man taught the world something that still resonates today, and has huge application in this society. He warned that the love of money is the root of all evil. When we at this publication examine at length (and we have done so for many long years and decades now) the countless evils that prosper in this land of ours, we have no choice but to come to the sorry conclusion that, that carpenter’s son had it right all along.
The things that are of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, with their majestic ascendancy on Good Friday and Easter Sunday point to and speak of a different kind of singular leadership. It is what we need here, and desperately. It is what we don’t have and this in spite of (or because of) the many trials and errors that always seem somehow to bring us the same result: the tragic figures of corrupt flesh clothing still more corrupt minds. We must not give up hope, we must find a way to overcome, and we will!

---

---