By John Singarayar SVD –
I grew up thinking God lived at the top of a palmyra tree.
Not literally — I knew better, even as a child. But there was something about the way those trees stood along the riverbank near our village in Tamil Nadu that made you feel small in the right way. Straight and unbending, they climbed out of the black cotton soil and kept going until the crowns disappeared into the heat haze. You could not take one in with a single glance. You had to start at the roots and travel all the way up. And somewhere in that upward journey, something in your chest would quietly shift.
I was maybe eight the first time I really paid attention.
My grandmother woke me before the river mist had lifted and walked me down to the palmyra grove at the edge of the riverbed without explaining why. She stood at the base of the youngest tree, looked up, then reached for the tender frond at the centre — the newest one, still soft and folded, not yet open to the world — and drew it down with both hands.
She turned and pressed it into mine.
It was lighter than I expected. Still cool with the morning. She looked at me the way she did when she meant something completely.
‘Kanna’, she said, her Tamil low and unhurried. It grew where we could not reach. Now it is here, in your hands. Hold it and think about why.
I did not understand her. I was eight. But her words stayed the way the river stays in the land long after the flood has passed — quietly, invisibly, and shaping everything.
The palmyra does not apologise for its height. It goes straight up, single-minded, until it is above everything around it. And yet its most valuable part is also its most tender — the young frond at the growing heart, still pale and folded. In our village, those fronds became roof thatch that kept monsoon rain off a family’s head. Women wove them into fans and mats. The sap from the crown became cool, sweet padhaneer (palm drink), drawn before sunrise. What grew unreachable at the top came down and became shelter, became food, and became the quiet material of everyday riverbank life.
I have turned this over more times than I can count.
Because I think we misunderstand the direction of faith.
We speak of reaching God, climbing toward something higher. The language almost always points upward – and there is truth in it. But Palm Sunday tells the story from the other direction.
The crowd lining the road into Jerusalem that day was reaching upward with everything they had. They spread branches on the road and cried ‘Hosanna’ — which at its root means ‘save us now’. A cry aimed straight at the sky.
And Jesus came. But not the way they were looking.
He came on a borrowed donkey, unhurried, headed not toward a throne but toward a borrowed tomb. The King arrived the way the Palmyra frond arrives — drawn down from its high place, placed into human hands, and quietly useful in ways that would only become clear much later.
The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. John writes this as though it were simple. It is not simple. The one through whom the Cauvery was set flowing became tired after a long walk. Became the kind of person who needed water in the afternoon heat, somewhere to sleep, and someone to talk to. He came all the way down. And then further still, into suffering, into abandonment, into death.
Philippians 2 calls it an emptying. He gave up the fullness of what he was so we could receive what we could never have climbed high enough to reach alone.
There was a season in my late thirties when I needed this truth more than I had words to ask for it.
My grandmother had been unwell for nearly three years — not suddenly, but in that slow way that wears a family down. I was taking overnight buses home from Chennai, watching my mother hold herself together through will alone. God, in that season, felt like the top of the palmyra. There, possibly. But requiring more of an upward stretch than I had left in me.
One morning I sat on the riverbank steps with a dried palm frond from the previous Easter — brittle now, the green long gone. I turned it in my hands in the grey light, and my grandmother’s voice came back across thirty years.
It grew where we could not reach. Now it is here, in your hands.
Something in me that had been braced for a long time slowly let go.
Because Jesus riding into Jerusalem was not arriving to manage our pain from a safe height. He was arriving to enter it. He stood at Lazarus’s tomb and wept — not after the resurrection, in relief, but before, in the plain presence of loss, letting grief reach him without deflecting it.
I did not expect a God who could be undone by grief. That is not the God I imagined at eight, looking up through the palmyra fronds.
That is a better one.
This Palm Sunday, hold your branch and feel the lightness of it. Something that grew far above you is now close enough to carry. Let that mean something.
God did not stay at the crown of the tree. He came down past every point where love could reasonably have stopped — past dignity, past safety, past the last moment anyone would have blamed him for turning back — and placed himself in our hands. To shelter what is exposed in us. To feed what has been going hungry.
My grandmother has been gone eighteen years. But I still hear her beside that riverbank tree, pressing something cool and light into a child’s uncertain hands.
It grew where we could not reach. Now it is here.
He came down so we could live. I am still learning what that means. Standing here, older now, with the riverbed still running below our village, I think I will be learning it for the rest of my life.
I find I do not mind that at all.