Haitus

Life Along the Rabbit Trail was always intended to be a journaling experience about...  as the names says, Life's Rabbit Trails — things I learned and found interesting as I came upon them.

It was an 'as the Muse moves' kind of thing. A serendipity thing.

Well, a couple of years ago my Muse started getting preachy and political...
 ... and I didn't want my Life Along the Rabbit Trail to be all that.

Eventually I began another blog, Bootcamp Planet.

If there is nothing new here for a while, I am probably there.  I'll give you a LINK


It has some politics.
I will also be dumping my notes for my Pets-in-Heaven project over there, (since a couple of spiral notebooks, a wall of post-it notes, and an envelope of scribbles on scrap paper is not a real "book" and never will be if I don't organize them).  

Real History

An archived letter from a Southern blacksmith during the Civil War —

"Those blacks are starting to believe we are at war to end slavery but I am a blacksmith and this damn war is about saving the Bill of Rights and Constitution from aristocrats in Europe who want to turn us all into something called taxed employees. Texas needs to remain its own republic for the sake of Liberty. The only the government and those bankers can keep controlling folks is to end their legalized slavery, which there ain't many slaves I ever seen in my lifetime. We use cotton gins and former slave babies own land and have business too like me, though most are too dumb to make anything of themselves unless they blame us white folks who ain't never done nothing to them. Blacks sold blacks to the bankers and aristocrats. We never owned a slave. Hell we are all slaves to those bastards in the government and banks. Slaves are human and God's creatures but so are white slaves and Native slaves, and Mexican slaves. But those banks took over our government before I was born, like Santa Anna, and make us all employees of these very same aristocrats who are the real slave owners in the North, South and in Europe. This is why blacks are joining forces in the south, and the uneducated ones run to the north for promises Lincoln will never keep. Those aristocrats they will kill him first. The educated blacks anyway, stay here in Texas. Ain't no poor white man ever beat a colored black or native. We are best friends in the watermelon patch. It is the rich folk who ain't like us who done all that killing and whipping and starving. And I suppose it is a black mans right to find personal justice. But it ain't us poor white folk and blacks know that. But European money is now helping Lincoln and we can't win unless we take down Washington. Lee is a true American, and he has lost battles on purpose to save lives on both sides but the Union is crazy as hell and wont stop coming. Its like they are possessed like demons or something. Full of hate and rage. I suspect Lee will surrender just in hopes to save Americans lives. We are both North and South, all Americans. White, Black, Native. Lee thinks he can do more by ending the war then after words politically fighting the establishment and bankers. I think we need to wipe them off the face of the earth for good or they will rewrite history and no one will ever know the real truth about this unholy war that the bankers started. They will change history and burn all the evidence in Dixie Land to the ground."

In God's Hands,
Originally posted by "Pvt. Ben." This was his great-great-great-grandfather's letter. 

Palm 🌴 Sunday

One of the issues with the programmed Sunday school "quarterlies" of my childhood was that they were written as single-event lessons. If, make that a big IF, any dots were ever connected, they were drawn almost exclusively as "good character" themes, rarely as cause-and-effect in the flow of history, and never as patterns of how God works. Moving forward…

Today, the congregation was challenged to draw their own dot-connecting lines and go google the kinds of palms used on the First Palm Sunday. I discovered that this is easier said than done.

My first search was for "genus species palms jerusalem jesus triumphal entry".  (It used to be that starting big would weed out many mismatches, but Google changed algorithms over the years, effectively dumbing-down searches and guiding them to those that are more popular or more politically correct. As often happens, this "simplification" has made life harder.)
  
All of the first four matches had "Palm Sunday" in the title. Notice that "Sunday" was not a search term!
My third match, one that you'd think would be pretty close to what I had asked for, included:

• When God Isn't Green: A World-Wide Journey to Places Where Religious Practice and Environmentalism Collide, by Jay Wexler  (Sounds fun, doesn't it? /sarc)
• Wiggles's Easter Journey, by Jamie Lynn Walters, a 22-page paperback children's book that retails for $10.95
• This Youtube video of a "Palm Sunday Cross" which might be more accurately titled, "Chanters with Staple Guns Gone Wild."   (click and it will open in a new window)  By the way, "male singer synonyms" gets blocked as an "unsafe search!"  

So that was a no-go. And yet, I persevere…

No surprise, the palm used the first "Palm Sunday" was the date palm, (which is also cultivated commercially in California, btw, some random trivia). I found the best search term to be "trees of the holy land." This yielded lots of matches, an overwhelming percentage of which are geared to children  🤔 hmm…

But according to the Science of Correspondences website, the date palm symbolizes knowledge of the Lord. Its singular stem (we'd probably call it the trunk, but biologically it is a stem,) rises straight heavenward and its leaves branch in all directions; there is no direction in which He cannot save.

Palms also show up in temple art.

1st Temple — And he (Solomon) also inlaid all the inner walls of the Temple—both the inner and outer sanctuaries—with carved engravings of cherubim, palm trees, and blooming flowers.  […] He covered the two doors of olivewood with carvings of cherubim, palm trees, and open flowers. He overlaid them with gold and spread gold on the cherubim and on the palm trees.  1 Kings 6:29, 32

2nd Temple — It (the inner temple) was carved with cherubim and palm trees; and a palm tree was between cherub and cherub, […] From the ground to above the entrance cherubim and palm trees were carved, as well as on the wall of the nave. Ezekiel 41:18, 20

Interestingly, and no doubt purposefully, the palms are found on doors and entrance halls; not at a destination but in places that lead to somewhere else.

Palm branches show up again in Revelation 7:9.

After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands; Revelation 7:9 - NAS

Palm branches used during the Feast of Tabernacles typically represent Thanksgiving. I'm going to go out on this limb and posit that all the many symbols for palm branches apply here: knowledge of salvation, joy of the king, and thankfulness they made it!  


And now back to my connecting-the-dots complaint of the first paragraph—
In case you grew up with disconnected Bible stories too, here are three tidbits about Palm Sunday that I've cobbled together as an adult:

• The story about raising Lazarus from the dead was not far back in the timeline. In fact, as we learn toward the end of the 11th chapter of John's Gospel, that was the miracle that triggered the forming of the plot to kill Jesus. Jesus' few remaining weeks were spent teaching parables, essentially exiled in the wilderness near Ephriam. This puts a different light on the fact that the disciples had an extremely hard time at first believing that Jesus was resurrected. They had seen someone come back from the dead fairly recently, so Jesus wasn't being "unfair" in setting high expectations for their faith.
The raising Lazarus story and Jesus' subsequent "time out" from the area around Jerusalem also helps explain the large crowds on Palm Sunday. It wasn't a handful of kids like the artwork in my Sunday school lesson. This was the first opportunity for most people in and around Jerusalem to see the man who had raised Lazarus from the dead, and they came in droves.

• When the crowds called Jesus the "Son of David," that was almost a throw-away ID in my childhood Sunday school. The teacher who did take the time to explain it said that people didn't have last names back then, so they'd refer to an ancestor to know which family was meant.
But… David had a real son, Solomon, who also rode a beast of burden on the day he became king. This is one of those patterns from the Old Testament that repeats or corresponds to something in the New Testament. I will even look it up for you:

and David addressed them. "Take your lord's servants, have my son Solomon ride on my own mule, and take him down to Gihon. 1 Kings 1:33

Can you say foreshadowing?

• Another pattern is found in Psalm 118. Beginning at verse 19 we are told about entering at the gates, a description of Jesus follows, and by verse 27 we read:

The Lord is God,
and he has made his light shine on us.
With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession
up to the horns of the altar.

The horns of the altar were covered with gold, a kingly metal, and would be touched by the priest with the blood of a sacrifice as a sin offering.  This is yet another type and pattern that connects dots.



So there you go...