Mtr Mary Trainor

But I believe there'll come a day when the lion and the lamb
Will lie down in peace together in Jerusalem…*

Dear friend,

Jesus on a donkey, along with a colt, and throngs of believers. Jesus at the threshold of Jerusalem.

In the Gospel storyline today from Matthew (21:1-11) we recognize it as very near Palm Sunday. The beginning of the end of his earthly life. In Jerusalem.

And there'll be no barricades then
There'll be no wire or walls…

I have not been to Jerusalem. Perhaps before I am no longer able, the opportunity may arise. But I know some things about it from scripture, and I believe the Jerusalem Jesus entered is an apt metaphor for what happens when money, and power, and greed, and lust of all kinds are more important than the very life of God.

And we can wash all this blood from our hands
And all this hatred from our souls…

The sixties were my years, completing both high school and college during the decade of Vietnam, Flower Children, drugs, free love, major protests. Somehow I missed most of it.

While many of my generation were headed to the battlefield, or to Haight-Ashbury, or to Woodstock, I was commuting to college during the week, and working in the family business on weekends. It feels as if I missed the whole thing, for good or for ill. A memorable decade of history I know virtually only as history. I was an eye-witness who wasn’t watching.

When I woke up years later to what had passed me by, I began to explore it through its music. Dylan. Baez. Seeger.

I went through a big Joan Baez phase (actually I am still in it) and I find even her later work compelling, including her version of Jerusalem.

As I followed Jesus’ journey in today’s Gospel, I began to sing this song, and realized how the dream of peace is an old dream, a continuing dream through the centuries, a dream now.

The poets tell us about it. The singers keep the dream alive, of a lasting peace in which every facet of creation leaps for joy at the fulfillment of God’s plan.

And I believe that on that day all the children of Abraham
Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem…

Mtr Mary

*Jerusalem. Words by Stephen Fain Earle. 2002.