Dearly Beloved,
I feel like I have been living in Holy Saturday for some time now. What was is dead and gone. Many of you have lived through divorce. The death of a child. The death of a spouse. A parent. A beloved one. The loss of work. Financial downfall. Holy Saturday is where we find ourselves when what was is dead and gone. When our hopes, our dreams, our expectations for what life would look like.... our lives, I mean, are upended, torn in half, snatched form our fingers. And we find ourselves in that liminal space of waiting.... Not that something new has not yet begun, but that it hasn't been fully realized. We are mostly living in the no-longer and the not-yet...
I imagine all the places in the world where it is Holy Saturday -- all of us, grieving or ill or in the limbo between what was and what is not yet. And our world -- the places where violence is the way, where children die of bombs, malnutrition, overdoses, shootings, or communicable diseases.
I invite you to take some time today for grief. Some time to be still and listen -- to your own body, to the earth turning, to your soul. In her poem "Wild Geese," Mary Oliver writes: "Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine." Perhaps today is a day to tell about despair, yours, and to hold room for others' despair alongside yours.
And, if you feel rest/less, impatient with all that is unsolved in your heart and our world, know that you are not alone.
Note Rev. Dr. Gafney's Saturday reflection for today is gruesome -- it does not shy away from suffering or the trauma that lives afterwards. Please check in with yourself before you go on and read it. It's okay to take a pass. Or to come back to it another time.
And please know that I am with you in this moment. And I am available for conversation and prayer as you need over the next few days.
With love and peace, Thandiwe
Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney's Holy Saturday reflection:
Saturday: Rest/less
There was no sleep. There will be no rest. The festival is going on around us but all I can see, hear, smell and taste is the horror of yesterday. Three hours of agony after a night of worry. The sound of the crowd was deafening but I could still hear every blow of the hammer. And when it was over – it will never be over – it was even worse.
We kept hoping for a miracle, for him to raise his head and speak words of power and tear that whole place down. But he just hung there. And when his body sagged so hard the nails began to pull and tear, I knew he was dead. Without the crowds there was no noise to block the sound of the weight of his body falling onto that man when they took him down, or the sound of his flesh squelching when they pulled the nails back out. And then there is the smell of death, blood and piss and shit. I can still smell it, mingling with the scent of roasted lamb. Vomit and tears. The bitterness of Passover with none of the sweet.
Then I woke up, finding some sleep after all and it was all true.
And he is dead.
Dead and gone.
And tonight and tomorrow and the day after that he will still be gone.
I don’t know that I want to live in a world without him.
Not after he showed us what was possible.
I can’t forget that either.
Dead.
The word keeps ringing in my head like the blow of a hammer.
Dead today.
Dead tomorrow.
Dead and gone.
