This Sunday, March 24, is Palm Sunday. In the story of Palm Sunday long ago, Jesus enters Jerusalem riding a donkey as crowds received him chanting “Hosanna, blessed is he who comes in the name of God!”  

Ah how fickle is public acclaim. Only days later, the crowd shouted “Crucify him!” 

But we do this daily or weekly too, don’t we? Maybe you come to Ananda on Sunday (or watch online) or attend a class on the teachings and practices, and, for a time, feel some inspiration. In short order, unfortunately, the rabble mob of subconscious ego-protective attitudes and habits clamor for attention and all too soon the clouds of inspiration evaporate like fog under the midday sun. 

We do this also in our attitudes towards others. For a time, we think a person God’s gift to the planet (or yourself). In due time, when we at last discover he is not perfect or doesn’t meet our “high” standards, we are ready to throw him under the proverbial bus. (Rarely do we ourselves aspire, much less achieve, those selfsame high standards.) 

Americans, as motley a “race” as ever there has been, are decidedly (pun intended) fickle. We change jobs; spouses; homes; hobbies; gurus; and preferences like actors changing costumes between acts of a play.  

I recall how, in my college days when I knew it all, my (always) strongly held opinions might just as easily reverse themselves at the slightest hint of newly introduced ‘facts.” I became suspicious, therefore, of my own views and of the abiding interest I took in (usually) trivial matters that I so haughtily treated as profoundly important.  

Paramhansa Yogananda taught that “loyalty is the first law of God.” When I came across this years ago, I was taken aback. Having come of age during the tumult of the 1960’s when young people rejected the traditions of the past, loyalty was the very last virtue I would have thought worthy of my commitment! Free love, just one example of the many self-indulgent mantras of the time, is neither “free” nor “love.” I had yet to learn the importance of the popular game show whose name mimicked the lesson of life: “Truth and Consequences!”  

To succeed in your career; in maintaining physical and mental health; in nurturing healthy relationships; in spiritual awakening; in life itself: all require steadfast and focused commitment, seeing your tasks or goals to their appropriate end. 

Let Palm Sunday, then, remind us of how easy it is to be fickle in our habits, commitments, and especially the spiritual journey. A few of us are reading “God Alone,” the letters of counsel written by Sister Gyanamata. Her frequent counsel was to encourage the disciple to never give up and never fall away from the commitment to daily meditation, to devotion to God and guru, and to achieving right attitude and action. As Lahiri Mahasaya put it, “Banat, banat, ban jai!” (Doing, doing…..soon done!)