“Unless we walk through the darkness of Holy Week and Good Friday, unless we recognize the horror of sin and its consequence of Jesus dying on the cross, unless we experience the despair the disciples felt on Holy Saturday, we can’t fully understand the light and hope of Sunday morning.”
~Kathleen Stephens
How many of our churches liturgize No-Name Saturday, the Holy Saturday Waiting Room – a place of inbetweenness (between Good Friday and Easter Sunday), a life lived in the tension of the already and the not yet? It’s a state of silence, speechlessness, hold-your-breath uncertainness, shock. A day when all metaphors break down. The Empty Space Place where “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence.”
Literary critic and writer George Steiner, speaks of Holy Saturday (Easter Eve) as a day that contains most of what we know as human experience:
“There is one particular day in Western history about which neither historical record nor myth nor Scripture make report. It is Saturday. Ours is the long day’s journey of the Saturday. Between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste on the one hand and the dream of liberation, of rebirth on the other” (Real Presences [1989], 231).