Holy Saturday

It is odd to stand in the church this morning…  empty, the altar cleared, the lights dim, everything so silent and still… its as if the very building itself is holding it’s breath… waiting.

There is very little written about this day… it’s a day most skip over… a day to get ready for what is coming…. Good Friday to Easter Day with no stop in between… wrenching loss to joyous alleluias……

but every one of us who has ever walked the earth has experienced the emptiness of Holy Saturday. We cannot pretend it doesn’t exist, or just skip over it……..The profound silence of God…… The power and the pain of fear……. Loss….. or when hope is exhausted…

This is the day we all must deal with the darkness…. This day of terrifying emptiness, it is a time between time, a time of waiting, waiting for the pain to end, waiting for someone to tell you that everything will be alright, waiting for the phone to ring, that all will be well…..

My daughter, Chris is a corpsman in the Navy…. She was with the Marines in Fallujah at the height of the war in Iraq…. She would call when she could, the calls routed through different area codes, from all over the country… you never knew when she would be able to call… that was when I began to carry my cell phone everywhere, answering any phone call wherever I was, afraid I would miss her call.  There would be long stretches of time when I would hear nothing…….the only information the news with their stories of death and numbers killed or wounded…… then the phone would ring and I would be able to talk to her and know she was safe for that moment in time, and I could breath again and my heart could keep beating.

Today is not easy… it’s never easy……it never will be easy

Today we wait, in silence and darkness and fear….

Today we experience the pain of emptiness and silence….

Today we wait in hope that everything will be all right, the phone will ring and all will be well…

Then the flame of a new day is kindled, the sun rises, and the tomb will be empty and we can breath again, and our hearts keep beating……

But for today the only thing we can do is wait……….