I don’t often think about the weight of Holy Saturday, that stretch of
tension between the darkness of Good Friday and the rising light of Resurrection
Sunday. I like my Easters served well done, no blood in the middle, a side of
loud worship and french toast breakfasts and bright spring colors, please and
thank you.
I’ve no time for the gloomy stuff, the things of the in-between, the shades
of gray that seem to taint my rose-colored lenses every other day of the
year.
As children, Easter was always a time of peanut butter cups and festive egg
hunts, of honey baked ham and hot apple pie. Holidays equaled extended family dysfunction shoved under
the table, screams and fights and bubbling bitterness bottled up if just for a
day, glossing over the hard truths of this life with a half-hearted He Is
Risen and a slightly shorter sermon than regular Sundays.
I used to believe that holidays had to be perfect to be good, that Easter
meant no more fighting and no more sinning and no more heaviness. Just light.
Just a fresh spring breeze, blowing through the house of cards we built neatly
on top of our walls, our ruins, our fires.
This past Saturday came heavy for me, the death of my grandpa only days
before, on the precipice of Good Friday, where death seems to be all the rage,
all the pastors talk about. The death and the darkness and the brutality of the
Crucifixion, thousands of years ago, always with the hope of Sunday’s coming
resurrection.
But this death was more than a recited passage, more than another sermon on
the night is darkest before the dawn, but a tangible mess of things
broken and bleeding, dangling loose ends and chipped paint on the walls. Death
is a permanent fixture on earth here, at least. Inevitable, and brutal, no
matter how expected. And Friday walked into Saturday, promising the maybe hope
of Sunday, and I repeated that over and over to myself, through the haze of what
I was feeling, encrypted moments of impossible heaviness, weighed down by my
sudden inability to sort through thoughts and feelings.
This, I suppose, is a wobbly attempt at doing just that.
Maybe. Just maybe. Maybe there is more.
And I circled back to my maybes, that although Grandpa’s death was an always
thing, somewhere in the recesses of my heart I felt that Jesus’ wasn’t.
Somewhere down there, cradled in the immense depths of the deep, I knew that
Jesus was there, that he was still showing up today. This death is a
temporary thing, beloved one, your lives complete in the blink of an eye. But I
have brought eternity down into this world, look, I have brought eternity right
into your beating heart.
And even though I couldn’t see it, I knew it was in Grandpa’s heart, too.
And so Saturday was a back-and-forth kind of day, a day of running in circles
right when I thought I had jumped out of them. A day of wanting ever so fiercely
to be surrounded by people, laughing and sharing and being ever so present,
while wanting to curl up by myself with a blanket and some Netflix at the same
time. A day of clinging to the hope of tomorrow’s resurrection, this notion that
we all will rise again, that Love really does win in the end, while feeling so
weighed down with questions and fear, anger and guilt, sadness and doubt, that
maybe this whole Easter ‘thing’ was just a watered down attempt to make us feel
good about where we are now, where we’re going later. A day of searching for
glimpses of light and retreating back into the dark.
Holy Saturday was the blood in the middle of a not-so-well-done Easter, an
Easter stripped of the candy and the festive bright colors, an Easter with bare
bones and silent spaces.
I found myself in those silent spaces often, gazing out the window with
cloudy skies that seemed to mirror my heart and mind rather poignantly. It was
there that I kept re-discovering and repeating the maybes.
Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe tomorrow will bring a little
resurrection. Maybe this whole Easter thing really is a glorious radiant reality
we’re called to live into every day. Maybe. Just maybe.
And Sunday came with dim lights and flickering flames, booming worship that
rattled my ears but not my heart, and a probably powerful sermon where I
struggled to stay awake. And we declared he is risen, and I said all
the words, and even when they felt like cardboard on my lips, I realized that
this might be what the hope of maybe is all about.
That I was showing up, that I will keep showing up, because maybe
that’s how we rise again.
And we sang a song with easy lyrics, we believe in God the Father, we
believe in Jesus Christ, we believe in the Holy Spirit. And those simple
words rang the most true to me, in the end, that I didn’t hang onto these
beliefs from an island, wrestling with the light and the dark by myself, but
that we all believe, as the Body of Christ, through disagreements and
flaws and scars and fights that get too loud, we still believe and struggle in
all of this together, as family.
And maybe it’s day after day of continuing to show up, of asking hard
questions and being not afraid to lean into that uneasy tension of not-always
answers and crowded silent spaces. Maybe it’s fighting and fumbling through the
dark, grasping for true redemption before facing the truth that we’ve already
been redeemed.
The Cross has already redeemed us, covered us, showered that eternity down
into our hearts.
Maybe it’s that still small voice saying, Be still and rest. Redemption
is right here, right now, right away. Maybe it’s about leaning into that
reality, that Jesus always was, is, and is to come, and that somehow, someway,
through constellations and galaxies and light years, I still believe. Grandpa
still believed. We still believe.
This is my maybe resurrection, our maybe resurrection, a life lived in the Light that still feels like a slow crawl out of the dark grave sometimes. Maybe that truly is enough.
I'll miss you, Grandpa. I Love you Forever.