AWAITING: A Reflection on Holy Saturday

Today, across the world, we encounter a profound stillness. Symbolically, on Holy Saturday, churches, chapels, and tabernacles are empty - sanctuary lamps extinguished, and altars are stripped bare. This bareness mirrors the tomb itself and draws us into the mystery of Holy Saturday.

Holy Saturday, often overshadowed by the solemnity of Good Friday and the jubilance of Easter Sunday, calls us to pause, to wait, and to reflect. Today occupies a unique space between two defining moments of the Christian faith.

What insights does this day offer us? Might this day of invitational waiting speak to us of the quiet, hidden processes that precede transformation. Can we, like the disciples of old, sit with our doubts and hesitations, acknowledging that the path to new life is often paved with darkness, difficulty, and deferred answers? Holy Saturday beckons us to acknowledge that inner change often comes not with instant clarity, but in the spaces in between, where our belief is stretched and refined.

“Transformation is not a future event. It is a present activity.”

— Jillian Michaels

Holy Saturday’s spiritual richness lies in its invitation to trust even when we cannot see the way forward. Our hope has the capacity to sustain and reassure us that God’s love holds us through all the seasons of life.

Let us pause to embrace this sacred, solemn interlude, and allow its stillness to deepen our awareness of the God of Goodness, who is always birthing new life.

-Sister Nancy Wales, csj

“The slow work of God is so much greater than the instantaneous. We can’t rush things into existence.”

Image: Alicia Quan/Unsplash

The Strangeness of Holy Saturday

My enduring memory of Holy Saturday evokes a sense of a strange emptiness and endless waiting in a dark void. This final day of lent follows the dramatic liturgy of Good Friday.  At the end of the Friday service, altar coverings are removed leaving a bare altar and an empty tabernacle. We are left to meditate on the suffering and death of Jesus in a liturgical vacuum.  Saturday’s bewildering atmosphere is one of restless waiting.  We are part of a suffering universe longing for the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise of resurrection and redemption.  This day we dwell in hope.    

Crown Of Thorns With Royal Shadow Watercolor Digital Art by Allan Swart

This state of emptiness throughout Holy Saturday prepares us for the Easter Vigil which traditionally begins on the same evening. The strange atmosphere of Holy Saturday increases our longing to celebrate the Easter drama which renews and strengthens our faith.  We are ready to rejoice in professing that we and all that exists have been created by a God who loves, forgives, and redeems us.  

Our world is full of suffering caused by hate, wars, greed, and the destruction of our planet. Yet, amid this chaos, there is much love to be found in the work done by so many ordinary people to care for persons and the earth.  Love, not force, violence, or punishment brings about change.  Easter is the most important feast in the liturgical calendar.  It is a celebration of our faith in God who will not abandon what He has created.  The victory of Jesus’ resurrection is a celebration of great joy, a promise of redemption, and a call to renew our faith. We participate in a loving union with God who invites and empowers each of us to share in this work of healing our world and bringing about unity among all peoples and with all of creation. 

- Sister Patricia McKeon 

Holy Saturday - Time “In-Between”

Image: Unsplash/Pisit Heng

The Paschal Mystery we have just celebrated in the Western Christian Churches is written about by theologians as one event beginning with Holy Thursday through to the Easter celebration of Resurrection.  However, this time is filled with so many events that our human experience and understanding requires that we pause from one day to the next to help us more fully enter into the Mystery of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  I like to think of Holy Saturday as “in-between” time.  What does this mean?

This is time to pause to help us enter the mystery of which we are a part.  This time is where we live our lives – between birth and death and rebirth into communion with God.  As we learn from the life of Jesus we are invited into the journey of love.  Any of us who watch the news or read the newspapers know that so much of what we see and read, is the opposite of love.  We see a false sense of power which destroys life and love.

Image: Unsplash/Alicia Quan

This Holy Saturday if each of us paused just long enough to consider how life can teach us to love and not to be lured into a false sense of power.  Jesus before Pontius Pilate remained detached from the power of Pilate.  Jesus understands that he too has power that is of God.  We desire to know this and can only learn its truth if we stop to listen for that longing in our hearts.  Our longing for what is yet to be realized is part of the birth of what is yet to come.   To long for love in our lives and our world is to be part of the creation of love.  To desire wellness for our families and the earth is to stir the energies within us that can be transformed into words and actions of well-being for our world.  This is the holy desire we touch on days like “Holy Saturday”.  In the words of John Philip Newell, “…This is the holy desire we can be part of, to long for oneness even in the most broken and apparently God-forsaken places of our lives and our world.  Desire leads to conception and conception leads to birth.”  This is how we walk this journey of life and love.  Blessing of love for all.

- Sister Joan Atkinson, CSJ