Palm Sunday

Well this year Palm Sunday was a bit different from last year.

Fr. Bill Martin was with once once again. A retired Air Force Chaplain, he has been joining us for Palm Sunday through Holy Week and Easter for over a decade now, staying at the AUTEC base during his stay, and getting in a little flyfishing for bonefish at the same time. This year, however, he would be leaving us on Holy Thursday and missing the Triduum and Easter. So while the joy of Palm Sunday was VERY present, it was different knowing Fr. Bill would soon be leaving and missing our Easter Celebration.

With that said, we were blessed to find Fr. Frank Herrmann, a priest from Boston College, who was willing to fly down on Holy Thursday and celebrate the Triduum and Easter. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The day before Palm Sunday we gathered up local palms like last year. Palms here are a bit different from palms distributed in the US. I never realized that in the US we only really got one leaf from the palm branch. In the Bahamas everyone gets a whole branch - which means getting ready for Palm Sunday here is a bit more work.

Fr. Martin blessed the palms outside and processed into church like last year. With everyone waving a branch, this really is an impressive site.

Finally, we proclaim the Gospel of Christ's passion, using the 4 part dialogue that involves the Priest, Deacon, Narrator and Community. This interactive proclamation of the Gospel is a powerful witness to Jesus' passion. This pic is from our parish in Cargill Creek, about 40 miles south of our home in Fresh Creek.

Next it is on to the Triduum - Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday - three days and 6 liturgies later we will finally rejoice on Easter! This year we have 4 adult converts that will be welcomed into the Catholic Church during the Easter Vigil - and the Kingdom of God continues to grow, even here on Andros.

Peace

The High School Choir Join Us

Well my friends I am finally able to down load pics from our camera onto the computer. So, while we are in the midst of Easter, I can share with you an event we created during the 5th week of Lent.

I had heard through the grapevine that our High School had a choir, and so I did a little leg work and we were blessed to have a visit by the Central Andros High School Choir. The Bahamas is a Christian nation (that fact is actually written into the Bahamian Constitution). So - the public schools here teach religion classes AND they have a Christian Choir at the High School.

The Choir was looking for places to perform and, after talking to the Director we invited them to join us. Well, it took some planning but it actually happened! It turned out that the biggest challenge was getting them to show up at our 8:30 Sunday morning liturgy. In retrospect I think 8:30 on a Sunday morning is a challenge for most teens, but they were there.

Actually, it was about half. Throughout the service kids would come in and join these 6 hardy souls until we were at about 12 by the end of the service - including 2 liturgical dancers that made the Lord's Prayer come alive.

After this service we drove in a little caravan of cars and mini-vans to the next church and Cargill Creek got a full dose of wonderful singing and the liturgical dancers did not disappoint. We hope that whenever they want to perform in public again they consider us. They were fantastic and they will always be welcome!