When people today go on holiday or pilgrimage it's customary to send friends a postcard. Many of these contain just a few words, ‘having a lovely time, glad you’re not here’. Few would be able to include the detail written by a woman who recently travelled to Jerusalem. She'd gone on pilgrimage and sent back not one postcard but about twenty letters. There don't appear to have been any complaints from the postmen but these may not have survived. What has and are still being read are all those letters. They have been published but I doubt their author will receive any royalties. Her 'recent' pilgrimage was, after all, one that ended fifteen hundred years ago!

Her name was Egeria and her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 4th century is still being appreciated. Her letters are proof that the Jerusalem liturgy in the 4th century already contained the essential elements of what we will celebrate today. She described "all the people going with their bishop up to the Mount of Olives... they read the passage from the gospel where the children, carrying branches and palms, met the Lord, saying: Blessed is he that conies in the name of the Lord. immediately the bishop rises, and all the people with him, and they all go on foot answering one to another: Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord. And all the children, even those who are too young to walk, are carried by their parents on their shoulders, all of them bearing branches, some of palms and some of olives, and thus the bishop is escorted in the same manner as the Lord was of old... "

It should be good to know that while we may have added and enlarged certain parts to the liturgy the emphasis remains the same: while the doors of his city are opened for the King, the Church is already celebrating his triumph, being assured of the victory he will gain by his glorious cross. DG