Fine wine takes time. ~ every skilled vintner

It takes a very long time to become young. ~ Pablo Picasso

I have said elsewhere that the tendency to skip over Good Friday and to rush unperturbed and undisturbed in our Sunday best to Easter is fraught with peril and that if we succumb to this contemporary inclination we are the worse for it. The result is Easter Lite at best. How can we dare to sing “Death, where art thou sting” if we skip over the dying part—the goodbyes, the betrayal, the via dolorosa, the torturous pain, the excruciating abandonment? The joyful release of resurrection– “He is risen!”-– can only be measured against the cry of utter forsakenness, left for dead, left for the mockers and the crude talkers and the vultures: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

The liberation we participate in at Easter has to be at least a bit bigger than the anguish that kidnaps us or presses us down, big enough to embrace the grief that devastates so many others who cruelly, innocently, and unjustly suffer. The Spirit of new life has to be real enough and strong enough to heal those forced to be weary wanderers on an earth that groans in travail for justice, for mercy, in a world that either turns away from, tolerates, or is titillated by so many contemporary Golgothas, so much violence and violation and inhumanity to one another and our planet.

Our haste to get to the joy of Easter is understandable. It’s hard to abide in the unknown. The danger is succumbing not just to the temptation to want to skip the terror and agony of Good Friday, but to bypass the tedious waiting, dormant darkness, or agonizing sense that nothing is happening on the Holy Saturdays of our lives as well. “The hell with sorrowful mysteries,” people cry. “I want the joyful and glorious mysteries of life.” Don’t we all? In a fast food nation where acceleration is seen as a virtue, if not a right, we want our transformation instantly, our healing quickly, our liberation immediately, and our Easter NOW. “Give me a squeaky clean white-robed risen Jesus with no signs of wounds” goes the refrain, “then I’ll gladly get in line. Sign me up with water, and fragrant oil, and an all-you-can-eat feast with bread and wine and I’ll follow. But make it snappy and convenient and pain-free. I’ve got things to do.”

But the gift of salvation, that is, the Life of Life that is the animating, sustaining, and healing force of the reign of God, does not come with the wave of a wand any more than spring comes without the price of winter, any more than this year’s super bloom in the desert did not come at the end of a long drought.

We Christians are in serious need of a Holy Saturday spirituality. As I mentioned earlier, Triduum tells the Christ-story which is the exemplar, cosmic, earth, and human story, and therefore our story which is the sacred story of love, loss, and liberation. If we continue this alliteration, we might say that between the agonizing loss of life and not yet a scintilla of hope on Good Friday and the jubilation and liberation of Easter Sunday is the liminality of Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday is between time. It’s in-between space. It’s when nothing appears to be happening and when everything that is really real and of the essence is occurring in the hidden workings of transformative love. Liminal, literally means “threshold.” Holy Saturday is the cross-point in a doorway where entrance becomes  exit, where an old wardrobe with old coats and wooden back panels becomes a portal into another realm, where cul de sacs uncoil and become new paths out, where execution for trumped up insurrection is trumped by resurrection and the just direction of love, and ultimately where death births forth to new life. This is why the earliest baptismal fonts were birth canals most often shaped like wombs or coffins since the new birth of Easter is a labor of love, a jubilation well-acquainted with grief, suffering, and death. Any other kind of Easter is about as helpful as cheap sour wine offered to a dying man impaled on a crassly assembled cross.

Holy Saturday is where the Humpty Dumpty Christ and our achy breaky hearts are put back together again by the transforming power of love. It is not a time for us to do much, if anything. There is nothing for us to do except wait on God, pause, be still, come clean, maybe mourn and acknowledge our own need and desire to be reassembled by the power of divine love. Holy Saturday symbolizes the time, space, and vulnerability it takes for all authentic transformation, all genuine healing, all lasting liberation to occur. It is the time and space for us to imagine that the sacred community of the earth can be repaired as well if we dare to commit ourselves to the incarnation of what Dorothy Day called “the revolution of love.” It is time and space for us to cooperate with the eastering of hope, the gestating of reverence and deep sympathy. It’s the composting of Christ in us and the fertile darkness from which wonder and awe, kindness and love, compassion and justice, joy and praise bud forth and blossom in our lives.

It is in the Holy Saturdays of our lives consciously entered into—when we hang in the balance between the grief, confusion, exhaustion, betrayal, loss, or shame we can taste and the praise, clarity, fecundity, bliss, and peace which we cannot—that we first get a taste of “that joy which death does not have the power to destroy.”

Holy Saturday reminds us that acceleration is a ruse, a disguised effort to outrun the vacuity of our lives or the agony of our own Good Fridays, whether self-inflicted or through the misguided or cruel work of others, and an excuse not to notice the continued Bad Fridays exacted upon so many of God’s children. The world’s affliction is Christ’s affliction just as Christ’s hidden transfusion of love in the tomb of Holy Saturday is the womb and the passage of new possibility for us and for all the earth. The disgrace of Good Friday ferments in the spacious grace of Holy Saturday. Today, Holy Saturday, is our quiet reminder that “it takes a long time to become young,” to become human, to be Christened, to be resurrected, and to become the love by which we are loved and enlivened.

Updated April 2019