A Call For More Holy Saturday
By the Rev'd Jonathan Chesney
Assistant Rector, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Auburn, Alabama
This is a call for more #HolySaturday. We need it. Not more to do, exactly, it is already too busy a week for easy contemplation; but more space, rather than just a day to set the lilies out for Easter.
This is the day of Middle Space, the in-between times, the place caught between trauma and joy, threads of both, but hope is lit low. I'd guess many people in the world spend more time in Holy Saturday in their life than their Good Fridays and Easter Sundays.
This day is harder to talk about, harder to acknowledge. This is the stone cold tomb, sealed shut, laughter laid low, bread gone stale, wine sour. Life and death have woven together and it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. These are the middle days, this is the middle space, this is Holy Saturday.
This is the grey day, with shadowy places and lighter spaces, but no clear path seen, hope is a whisper of the breeze, death is something unseen moving in the underbrush nearby. This is the waiting for something, the silent desperation, but trying to move forward anyway. This is 5 years into a 15 year prison sentence, this is several months or a year or two from now for the families of our brothers and sisters killed in Garissa. This is the long loneliness that gnaws on our edges even as we try to fill our lives with meaning.
This day is harder to talk about, harder to acknowledge. This is the stone cold tomb, sealed shut, laughter laid low, bread gone stale, wine sour. Life and death have woven together and it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. These are the middle days, this is the middle space, this is Holy Saturday.
Church: we need this, and so often we rush by it, even more quickly than by facing torture and death on Good Friday. Writers, we need more homilies, more poems, more prayers to accompany us in the Middle Space. Musicians, perhaps some now wordless song to hum while wandering the trackless paths. Maybe not another service at church (the lilies do, actually, need to be placed,) but better devotional resources for families to use and reflect upon, perhaps a house liturgy somewhere. Easter Vigil can already be a tough sell sometimes, but in places where one can, perhaps the push towards the early Sunday AM Vigil services (what's better than the first Alleluia coinciding with Sunrise, anyways?) We need something more for Holy Saturday, because it is such a larger part of most lives, I believe, between death and life, between hope and despair, than represented by the time we give it.
Peace go with us.