Holy Saturday

On her website, The Painted Prayerbook, Jan Richardson speaks about the "in between day"...the day between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. I have said to many people...please...don't fast forward to Easter Sunday! Even though we KNOW that He Lives, there is so much to bless our souls when we intentionally remember that somewhere between the death and the resurrection, Jesus descended into hell (to the dead).

He moves into the deepest and darkest and emptiest aspects of existence to redeem and reclaim all that is! Stay with the power of that kind of love....Sunday is coming...but what opens when you stay, for just a while, with Holy Saturday?

Whatever Christ was up to (or down to) on Holy Saturday, for his followers it was a day of sorrow and bewilderment. Bereft of the one around whom they had shaped their lives, they had to choose whether they would isolate themselves in their sorrow and fear, or whether they would remain together and wait for a way to present itself.

Holy Saturday is not a day for answers. It is a threshold day, a day that lies between, and so resists any easy certainty. It is a day of waiting, of remembering to breathe, of willing ourselves to turn to one another when grief lays hold of us. It is a day to open ourselves to the one who goes into the places of deepest pain and darkest fear, in order to bring us out.

Jan Richardson

I offer also, (once again) a poem/prayer which emerged from one of my own Holy Saturdays.

The Harrowing of Hell

I dwell in torment….

My soul is empty…agonized…

Every small or grand wrong I ever did is wrapped around what’s left of my spirit’s heart…like cords of iron. Every motion I make clamps the vice of my sin another degree…and every day I am drawn more deeply into the yawning chasm that is eternal….dark….despair. I thought death was finality…that it was total nonexistence….

That would have been better… far better.

The empty desolation of all that I ever was is aware of the skulking presence

Oh my soul… it is the Angel of Darkness… holding me in its chilling burning clench…. Providing empty infusions that sustain me with perpetual, hopeless LOSS….

In the center of my heart, yet in the remote distance I hear LOVE silently moaning….A strong yet beaten voice cries out “Father…. Why have you forsaken me?”

Then…. From beyond wherever I am, a stirring of windy breath and a voice crying out. It splits the cosmos with: “It is finished….”



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In the center of my desire, yet in the remote distance something stirs…. Like new life nestled deeply in a womb…

Chains, shackles and weights are loosened, lifted up in life breathing joy…

Eyes long dissolved see Love and hear forgiveness claiming a parched soul. I am enfolded…claimed…. Gathered into the ONE who formed fibers and flesh in the bowels of the earth long before time began…before there ever was time….

Alpha…Omega….Priestly Beloved Companion….Oh Lord… My God…. How can it be that you came here to find me?

What more can I say…..Ah…..Holy Jesus…. Thank you…….