Standing in the Dark, Waiting for the Light
April 11th, 2020
The Saturday in between Good Friday and Easter has never felt so real.
In the past, Holy Saturday for me was little more than a stepping stone in between Good Friday and Easter morning. An intellectual awareness of the grief and waiting experienced by Jesus' disciples, friends, and family who didn't already know how the story would end. We have the luxury not only of knowing how the book ends, but also the benefit of nearly two thousand years of interpretation, inspiration, and lived experience passed from generation to generation across the many flavors of Christianity.
The stories, the rituals, and the traditions passed down make the days in between Palm Sunday and Easter feel, during most years, like recitation of a play we've all seen so many times that the individual moments themselves are drained of impact. Not of meaning, but of the power to stop us in our tracks and truly transport us into the fear and grief in the hours before the world shifted again and resurrection became the second part of the story. An enigma. A mystery. Not an event I would dare to define or unpack here, but a clear demarcation between before and after. Saturday, the day in between two cataclysmic events. Time suspended in anticipation. Waiting without realizing there would be a book end so soon.
History is only clear in retrospect. As a lived experience, we cannot know one day to the next whether a sharp turn is going to appear on our path, whether the road before us will gradually turn from solid pavement to shifting sand, or if we've faltered even a slight degree on our course making the ultimate destination far from where we intended when starting the journey. These things cannot be seen from the perspective of each moment. And understanding builds only as we witness the places we find ourselves that could not be imagined or predicted.
Today is one of those days in both the micro- and macro-experience of my life. It's the Saturday before Easter. It's also a single day in the extended shelter-in-place much of the world is experiencing without knowing when it will end or what the contours and contexts of our lives will look like on the other side. We know there has been change. For many, the incomprehensible death of dear ones, parents, children, friends, and teachers already separates reality into "before" and "after" what will likely be known as the 2019-2020 Pandemic. When history is eventually written. For others, we're living in the slow expanse of in-between time. Trying to accept the loss of what was without really know what will remain. Grieving for the small things we've lost. Anxious to know when and how we move out of a state of suspended reality infused with uncertainty, and into the new normal waiting for us on the other side.
I don't have any answers tonight. But I know that as surely as Holy Saturday moves into Easter Sunday, we will walk this path through the darkness and into the light. Even if the light that shines reveals a world changed. A people altered. A future broken open to previously unimaginable possibilities in the shadow of inconceivable heartache. That future is coming. But it isn't here yet. In spite of the present darkness, I hold fast to the hope that we will transform the tragedy of today into a future where we build on the present sense of shared suffering to create a communion that heals the wounds that divide us.
