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Holy Saturday

April 19, 2014

I’m almost glad (not really, but you’ve got to see the silver lining) that the internet is out this evening, because I cannot concentrate on anything and so this might come off a bit crazy.  Nothing from the booklet is really striking a chord in this state, so I will talk about what I have been thinking about this Holy Saturday.

Recently, The Good Wife had a very unexpected death and the following two episodes are masterful portraits of how people respond to those deaths – all the complicated and subtle and even cliché things that they do to make sense of the world without that person in it.  And I thought about other examples, “The Body” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer stands out as a particularly good example.  But then I thought that every television show does this kind of episode well.

Not all television shows do the death sequences well, but they all do the aftermath mourning episodes well.  Is there something to that, I wonder?  Something soft and sacred and raw about those episodes that forbids the usually Hollywood trickery from taking hold even in the most cliché-ridden works?  Is there something devastating about that subject that makes even the laziest, hackneyed writer suddenly realize this is too important to fumble over?

There’s a deep reverence that we have for the presence of death.  And a deep fear.  I wrote many Easters ago about why the funeral rituals about the dead body were so important.  That we take the time to wash or view the dead body because we need to convince ourselves not so much that it is real but that it can be born.  That the world is still here.  That this is a part of the world now and that it will continue, simply different than before.

I think that’s the part of death – and this was a real death, so all the parts must be there – that Holy Saturday honors.  Jesus’s friends mourned for Him.  They looked at the world around them without Him there, and they realized that the world was still there, unchanged.  Or so they thought, of course.

Because they were the first of the lucky ones.  They are still far luckier than most of us – to have to wait only a day for the promised reunion that we all must simply believe will come to pass.  The first to learn that death has been conquered and we will meet again.  That all partings are a lie.

But first, before you can have the beautiful gift of Easter Sunday, you must have Holy Saturday.  You must have the quiet despair and the knowledge of the time to move on.  To look at the world as it could have been if not for God’s love – a colder and emptier place, without the loved one.

Otherwise how would we ever understand how much more beautiful is the world we have been given?