Times of Living In-between

On this Holy Saturday evening, when I know MSP blog-readers probably won’t see this until after Easter, if at all.  I am writing as a way to reflect on my thoughts of today. I have long experienced this day between the anguish of Good Friday and the joy of Easter Sunday as a kind of disturbing void. This morning I finally finished Philip Yancey’s The Jesus I Never Knew, and was struck by his closing comments about the meaning of this day:

…in a real sense we live on Saturday, the day with no name. What the disciples experienced in small scale—three days, in grief over one man who had died on a cross – we now live through on cosmic scale. Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment. Can we trust that God can make something holy out of a world that includes (Yancey, who wrote in 1995, says Bosnia and Rwanda; I’d now substitute Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Nigeria, among others) and inner-city ghettos and jammed prisons in the richest nation on earth? It’s Saturday on planet earth; will Sunday ever come? ...It is a good thing to remember that in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the in-between day with no name.

This afternoon I received an email from a former rector, retired bishop and beloved friend of almost 40 years, updating friends on the condition of his wife, Barbara, also a beloved friend, who experienced a brain aneurysm last Palm Sunday afternoon and has been hospitalized in intensive care since then. While Barbara’s doctors consider her to be in danger for several more days, her spirit is incredibly strong and she has made amazing progress. Her husband wrote today:

So for all your prayers and/or fervent hopes, we thank you from some place in our souls that has been bountifully fed. You are helping us walk the tightrope between anxiety and hope. It is a Holy Saturday kind of reality that we are in right now. Our Holy Saturday will be extended this year. We believe that we are past the worst of Good-Friday-like dread, but we are not yet ready to sing Alleluia. In our good time, we trust we will echo the Alleluias that many of you will be singing this Sunday.

And so today I have come at last to glimpse the meaning of Holy Saturday, at least for me. It is a metaphor for the in-between time, not only between Jesus’ death and resurrection or other specific events in our lives, but as the time in which we all live out our lives, in-between what happened, what is promised, and what we hope is to come.

Nancy Warren