Not much to write about today. Me, I plan a little quiet time to dwell on the mystery of Holy Saturday, that day of seeming vast emptiness and longing between the devastating sense of death and loss Good Friday brings, and that wonderful renewal of exultation and joy that comes with Easter, the Feast of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. As a kid, the Saturday before Easter was when we would go to church in the afternoon and bring our “mite boxes”, filled with pennies we would have saved up during Lent, and bring them up to be inserted inside big white wooden crosses (I wonder if they even do that anymore?). On Saturday night, we’d paint Easter eggs. Those are good memories.

My favorite Holy Saturday memory, however, is the first year I went to the Great Vigil of Easter service over at the Church of the Advent on Beacon Hill in Boston. Large, ornate very high Episcopal church, lovely architecture. It was an unusually warm and humid day that year, and with all the lights down during the reading of Noah and the ark you could hear thunder and rain outside. Very awesome.

I found a nice homily for this special, holy day over at Patheos.com; it sets the right tone in both word and spirit:

Before we rush to resurrection we must dwell fully in the space of unknowing, of holding death and life in tension with each other, to experience that liminal place so that we become familiar with its landscape and one day might accompany others who find themselves there and similarly disoriented. The wisdom of the Triduum is that we must be fully present to both the starkness of Friday and to the Saturday space between, before we can really experience the resurrection. We must know the terrible experience of loss wrought again and again in our world so that when the promise of new life dawns we can let it enter into us fully in the space carved by loss. As the great poet of Hafiz reminds us, we must let our loneliness “cut more deep” and “season” us, so that we are reminded of our absolute dependence on the Source of all.