WHAT IS A HOLY SATURDAY?

It is perhaps an occupational hazard that pastors share: we are often so busy during Holy Week and Easter that we don’t have much time to reflect on the mystery.  My sermon is now done.  There are still preparations to complete, the most important of which is my making a raspberry white chocolate cheesecake for our Easter Dinner tomorrow.  With raspberries from our garden, lovingly kept in our freezer.

What is Holy Saturday?  I would guess for most pastors it is a day between focusing on death and its great power and mystery, and focusing on resurrection and its wonder and doubt. Many churches have Easter Vigils tonight (we do not), but that really is a resurrection service. I looked forward to Easter Vigil when I was a kid for two reasons:  lots of pagan stuff in the liturgy (fire, light, praising the bees) and because after it was over, we would eat everything we gave up for Lent.

What was that first Holy Saturday like?  At the risk of oversimplification, the men were hiding, and the women were waiting.  The men, almost all of whom had fled, were in their fear.  Maybe so far into their fear they could not truly mourn.  The women who had stuck with Jesus to the bitter end, found a way to prepare the spices to return on Sunday and anoint his hastily buried body.  Then, starting at sunset on Friday “they rested according to the commandment”.  They obeyed the Sabbath even though God had not obeyed their deepest desire.   They waited and suffered in the space between death and hope.

I have no doubt that the women mourned deeply that Sabbath.  There was no work to be done, and even though it was the Great Sabbath during the Passover, there was no rejoicing.  But that mourning was faith itself. Because it did not seek to escape from reality itself.  The men practiced escaping (hiding is but another form of escape).  The women practiced grief and mourning.  (I make the distinction, perhaps unwise, between grief, the state given to us by death, and mourning, the actions we take in our grief.)

Was their practice of mourning the reason that the women could continue to be faithful in the face of their hope devoured?  Faithful to go to the tomb without knowing who or what could take the huge stone away.  Faithful to bring spices to anoint the body, in accordance with the love we owe the dead.  And was their faith—a faith born out of a willingness to be in the very reality they would have loved to have avoided—that enabled them to see the risen Christ and believe him.  The men doubted—another form of escape.

(Sorry men—we do redeem ourselves come Pentecost, so hold on.)

I think we do not know how to mourn very well in our society.  At least not collectively.  I’ve done two funerals in the last two weeks and will do my cousin Joe’s next Wednesday.  The best mourning I encounter often includes a lot of laughter, as well as wrenching tears.  The best mourning I see speaks of hope rather than certainty, it acknowledges death as a real power that has robbed us and not a blessing.  It cries out.

I don’t think we mourned very well as a nation after September 11, 2001. That was a terrible death, but the emotions I saw portrayed by our media and our political leaders quickly turned from sorrow to anger and to pride.  There was surely reason to get angry, and there was pride at the sacrifices firefighters and police and others made.  But think about a death of a loved one?  Anger would be in the mix, but would pride be quick to follow?

I think we did not give ourselves time to mourn enough, to cry out to God, to wait in the space between death and hope.  I don’t know if we wept enough. If we had, maybe we wouldn’t have made so much mourning necessary for so many people in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Guantanamo. I’m not saying we should not have had a response.  It’s that when our response is based on anger and projection of our power, it tends to squeeze out compassion.  Compassion is not afraid of powerlessness.  And powerless is how we were when those planes hit.

I could write about other grief work we probably need to do as a nation, maybe even going quite far back.  The genocide of the nations who were here, our embrace of slavery, the loss upon loss of immigrants coming to a new land, whether that was from Sweden in 1887, or Mexico in 2014.

What do you think?

As I was writing today, I realize that it was 40 years ago this month that I started preparing to be a poet.  Or better, it was 40 years ago this month that I started being prepared to be a poet.  For it was more a gift than an effort.  I was in Chicago, on an urban studies term, and went through a lot of grief work, though I did not realize all of it at the time.  Loss of the career path I was sure I was meant to be on (becoming a lawyer), loss of a “true love”, loss of my fierce unbelief.  Jody Kretzmann and others helped me to start reading poets that spoke to that loss and to the hope planted in all pain.  I’m going to attach two poems that I read over and over that spring and summer in Chicago, two poems that continue to help me  with this holy waiting, and this wrestling with God.

Be justice.  Be beauty.  Be in “the wounding that precedes hope”.

Patrick

The Waking                                                          by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

THE PREACHER RUMINATES BEHIND THE SERMON    Gwendolyn Brooks

I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master. No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.

Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of his importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit’s glare.

But who walks with Him?–dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?

Perhaps–who knows?–He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes He tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.