Stephanie-Therese

Suspended between two worlds

Holy Saturday is suspended between two worlds: that of the darkness and death of Good Friday, and that of the Resurrection and restoration of the Light of Christ on Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday is essentially a day of solemn vigil, prayer and meditation. It focuses on the grave, but Christ's tomb is not a place of corruption, decay or defeat. He is life-giving and a source of power and victory. Joy and sadness are intermingled.

The emptiness of this day is reflected in the Church's prayer. There is no Mass celebrated on Holy Saturday, and here at the convent where the Paschal Vigil is kept at 4.30 am on Easter Sunday, the evening of Holy Saturday is still and vacant. The Divine Office is pared down and simplified — no hymns, just simple chanting. Everything seems to be taken away, and we are left alone in the Great Silence of the Triduum. This vacuum follows the celebratory Eucharist of Maundy Thursday and the intense Liturgy of Good Friday. We are bereft. God, who cannot die, lies dead in a tomb.

On the first Holy Saturday, the disciples did not know the end of the story as we do. Their Sabbath was a day of confusion, desolation, failure, fear and loss. But even though we know the events of Easter Sunday, we too can experience these things in our own lives. And when we do, we must strive to make this place that is Holy Saturday a place of waiting and a place of hope.

A PLACE OF WAITING

Expectant in The Gloom

Waiting is what Isaiah did when God was absent. 'I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him' (Is 8:17). Isaiah also says:

They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary,

they shall walk and not faint. (Is 40:31)

So, this waiting on the Lord embodies power and strength in the face of God's hiddenness.

Holy Saturday is a place of expectant waiting. It is not a passive waiting where time merely passes, the danger of drifting in the darkness. One must be active and vigilant. 'Let your loins be girded and your lamps burning, and be like people who are waiting for their master to come home from the marriage feast, so that they may open to him at once when he comes and knocks' (Lk 12:35-36). When it feels as if God is hiding, 'we look for light, and behold, darkness, and for brightness, but we walk in gloom' (Is 59:9). How do we maintain expectant waiting in the gloom? There are, I find, three things we can do to seek God who is momentarily hidden from us. It is sometimes salutary to remember that it is not God who is absent, but often it is we absenting ourselves from God by our passive waiting and gloomy dispositions. So we must actively seek God.

Transcending the place where we are

The first thing we can do is to seek God in the Scriptures. To stay 'in touch', to stay close to him, there are few ways better than the Scriptures, especially the Gospels. It is the place where God reveals himself through the life and teaching of his Son Jesus, and where the apostles share their insight into the living of the Good News. Tor whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope' (Rm 15:4).

Secondly, there is the Holy Eucharist which is a very tangible sacrament — a touching, tasting, sometimes smelling, sacrament — that can ground us in the Presence even if we are numb. The story of our salvation is revealed in the Mass, the passion and death of Jesus and his Resurrection. The ritual and familiarity of the Mass allows us to transcend the place where we are, to come to a newer closeness to God. And the Mass is a corporate offering which brings us to the third point, which is community.

We must not shun community when we are in a dark and lonely place. Thomas fled the company of the disciples on Holy Saturday and missed the first Resurrection appearance to the group. Darkness, fear, unknowing and confusion can be alleviated and tempered by the presence of others. We are the Body of Christ, not individuals going it alone.

Praying into the great silence

Christ's repose in the tomb is an active repose, for he descends into hell to set the captives free and unloose the bonds of death. Our waiting, too, must be active. We must continue to seek God. We must pray through the emptiness that is Holy Saturday, We must pray into the great silence of Christ asleep in the tomb. Let not the silence and the absence lull us to sleep. 'Awake, 0 sleeper, and arise from the dead...”[1] Our waiting has an end, and Christ is risen.

It is good that we should wait quietly for the Lord, as we read in Lamentations (cf. Lm 3:25-26). And the Psalms bid us to wait in silence: Tor God alone my soul in silence waits; truly, my hope is in him' (Ps 62:6 161:6).[2] We must not let the time of spiritual desolation be a barrier to coming closer to God; rather, in the active waiting through it, we should let desolation become a means of closer union with God.

A PLACE OF HOPE

 Access to Grace

We know the end of the story — what follows Holy Saturday. We know that Christ has been harrowing hell, releasing the dead from death, and then rising on Easter morning, death vanquished. This knowledge brings us to a place of hope. So we live Holy Saturday amid its confusion and fear, its absence and waiting — and we live it in hope. When grounded in God and believing his promises, we have a hope which provides the incentive to live out our faith even in the face of trouble. This requires a total fixing of our confidence on God's goodness. Through our faith comes a hope which brings a confident expectation for our future.

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us. (Rm 5:1-5)

Sure of God's presence

Even though we often do not feel anything when we are in a Holy Saturday place, our hope, girded up by faith, will give us a certain assurance of God's faithfulness and of his presence. Therefore, our waiting should be shot through with hope. Setting God before our eyes, and hoping in the promise of his Resurrection, we will find 'pleasures for evermore':

I have set the Lord always before me;

because he is at my right hand I shall not fall.

My heart, therefore, is glad, and my spirit rejoices, my body also shall rest in hope.

For you will not abandon me to the grave,

nor let your holy one see the Pit.

You will show me the path of life;

in your presence there is fullness of joy,

and in your right hand are pleasures for evermore.

(Ps 16:8-111 15:8-11)

A spring welling up inside

Hope is a spring welling up inside to counter the gloom of God's hiddenness. The powerful combination of faith and hope lightens our spirit and brings us joy, because we know and trust the truth of his Resurrection and the new life which this brings to the believer. `For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience' (Rm 8:24-25), And it is in the patient waiting in the darkness that hope can come fully alive and flood our souls with confidence and trust in God's goodness. Hope is essential. The absence of hope leads to a sense of despondency and ultimately to despair, which is counter to the Resurrection-life in Christ Jesus. 'May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope' (Rm 15:13).

THE END OF THE STORY

Nurturing hope

As has already been said, the disciples did not know how that first Holy Saturday would end. But we do. And it is in this knowledge of Christ's Resurrection from the dead that we are enabled to live through our own 'holy saturdays' with patience and hope. This enabling comes through the power of the Holy Spirit. We seek and claim this power through a constant vigil of self, while ever directing our attention and energies towards God. We wait patiently in the darkness and confusion, the fear and unknowing that can engulf us at times. We nurture hope in this place while seeking the presence of God in the Scriptures, in the Mass, and in our neighbour.

A hidden action in our lives

In Holy Saturday, we encounter Christ's hiddenness in our lives. Holy Saturday can help us understand that God works out of sight in the depths of our life and with a love glides lower than death and the dark'' in the world as well. We may sense absence or void, but in truth Christ is very near to us and longing to do what he did on that first Holy Saturday: to harrow our hell and raise us to new life. So we must yield to him, through prayer and discipline, the dead wood of our lives — that it may be transformed in the new flames of the Paschal fire. Holy Saturday speaks of the completed sacrifice; but paradoxically, it is a place where we can come to know the incomplete nature of God's loving: the Love that never stops, for there is always more.

Since we know the story, the waiting becomes a place of hope and anticipation of God's action in our lives. He can break through the barriers of our feelings and blankness, bringing the Easter fire's Light into our lives. We may feel dead, but we wait in the knowledge that on Holy Saturday Christ was in hell raising the dead to new life. Holy Saturday is a place of waiting in anticipation of God's action in our lives.

Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. (Rm 12:12)

The author, a regular contributor to Mount Carmel with her articles and poems, is a member of the Community of the Sisters of the Love of God, an Anglican contemplative Order at Fairacres, Oxford, which is steeped in Carmelite spirituality. In this profound article, which will give hope to many, she enters into the bleakness of our own 'holy Saturdays’ — a place of semi-darkness where we wait, turned towards Christ, confident that his Light will break into our lives.

[1] From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday: see Divine Office, vol. II, p. 321.

[2] The second number for each of the Psalms quoted in this article refers to the Grail edition used in the Catholic liturgy.