Holy
Saturday—Now What?
It’s Holy Saturday, my favorite day of
the Christian year, and apparently I am to be blessed with being awake for every
single moment of it. It is not long
after midnight, although my sleepless evening seems much longer, as my attempts
to get some rest started close to nine.
There are a few holidays that seem to me
to resonate with real life. These aren’t
the holidays of majesty, or glory, sacrifice or tragedy. I think of Passover, which I secretly name
The Feast of Close Calls. Or Hanukkah,
The Feast of Getting By with Not Enough.
Who among us hasn’t celebrated those everyday miracles?
I think of Holy Saturday as the Great
Now What? Jesus is dead, the disciples
are scattered. There was that incident
with the cloth in the
I imagine some of Jesus’ followers
scratching their heads and wondering, “now what was
that about?” They might have started
thinking back to fishing nets and boat repairs.
Or not.
There are these moments when life seems
to empty out. There’s a bottom of the
bathtub feeling—a little echoey, alone, and bright. You are the only person left alive, in this,
your one true life. Now what?
C.S. Lewis says these moments are
dropped in there on purpose, often when we’re nosing toward the core of
things—sparking up our light, following our bliss, tuning in to call. He says God puts them there, because He is persnickety
about free will. He doesn’t want us to
become a ballerina or a gymnast or a priest for status or for rightness, or
even just for pleasure. We have to want
it all the way out of the bathtub, all the way across the desert, through our
long and solitary Holy Saturdays. Have
to choose it even when it doesn’t fit or feel right.
A friend told me she decided to become a
writer, just by writing every day. “I’m
not trying to become a publisher, or famous,” she declared. “I can’t control those things. But I can write—I will write, every day, and
so I’ll earn myself the title, and I’ll be a writer.” After a few months, I decided I would follow
her example. I told her, and she checked
in with me a few weeks after I’d begun.
“How’s the writing?”
“Well,” I said. “It sucks.”
“I’m not talking about quality” I
clarified. “I’m speaking of the act of
it. I’ve kept with writing every day,” I
told it. “And now I really couldn’t care. At first it was a challenge, but now it’s
just this thing I do. I feel absolutely
empty in it. Bored. Indifferent. Numb.”
She nodded. “It will pass,” she said. “If you last six weeks, the joy will filter
back.”
It’s been a dozen years, and I’ve not
yet made it through six weeks of steady writing. But I still lean on my friend’s quiet
confidence—when and if I do, the emptiness will lift,
the bathtub will fill up again. I guess
that’s why I also cherish Holy Saturday.
It feels like a small endorsement of this emptiness, this wondering, this awful in-between.
It feels like a quiet promise… “if you make it…”
and “there’ll be another chance.”
©
2008 Melissa Capers