Reflection for Holy Saturday
Today is the liturgical day the Church calls “Holy Saturday.” The Church calls it “holy” for one reason: because she recognizes its character as a day of silence. This is beautifully expressed at the opening of an ancient homily she uses in her Office of Readings:
“What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.”
The Church is silent, as it were. She abstains from the Sacrifice of the Mass and waits at the Lord’s tomb, contemplating the Lord’s descent into the realm of all those who have gone before him into death. It requires silence – a genuine, interior silence – to let this mystery come into view. When Christ, the Son of God, died in the flesh, a great mystery opened before the human race. In short, it is the mystery of what he did in time, relating to eternity.
We are reminded of the kind of silence Holy Saturday beckons us toward in something Rabbi Joshua Heschel wrote: “Spiritual life begins to decay when we fail to sense the grandeur of what is eternal in time” (The Sabbath).
“What is eternal in time.” This has an eerie relation to what’s going on in our current experience of the pandemic. We are faced with a dramatic event in time that calls us to face eternity. It’s not just that any of us could die from the virus; it’s that what we do in time has an eternal component! Rabbi Heschel puts it this way: “Life goes wrong when the control of space, the acquisition of things of space, becomes our sole concern.”
So we are before the tomb of Jesus Christ, as it were, in silence. Can I expand my awareness of my, of our, situation in this time, so as to capture, in however a small way, “the grandeur of what is eternal in time?” Consider, for example, the magnitude of one act of genuine love.
Reflection by Fr. Xavier Nacke, OSB
Posted in Daily Reflections, Lenten Resources