Holy Saturday

[Atticus Pizzaballa]

It still is Good Friday at this time in the USA but in the Holy Land Christ has been buried
for several hours and now around 4AM Holy Saturday....

Hans Holbein the Younger (ca 1497-1543), The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (ca 1521), Öffentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel

Lenten Grace — Be Still and Wait

I said to my mind, be still, and wait without hope

For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love

For love would be love of the wrong thing; yet there is faith

But the faith and the hope and the love are all in the waiting.

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:

So the darkness shall be light, and the stillness the dancing.

~T. S. Eliot, from “East Coker” The Four Quartets

This in-between day

after all had gone so wrong

before all will go so right,

puts us between the rock

and the hard place:

all hope, love and faith is squeezed from us.

Today we are flattened,

dried like chaff,

ground to pulp,

our destiny with death sealed.

We lie still

like sprinkled spices

trying to delay

inevitable decay,

wrapped up tight

stone cold

and futile.

The rock is rolled into place

so we lie underneath,

crushed and broken.

We are inside,

our bodies like His.

We are outside,

cut off and left behind.

We cannot know about tomorrow,

we do not fathom what is soon to come:

the stone lifted and rolled away,

the separation bridged,

the darkness giving way to light,

the crushed and broken rising to dance,

and the waiting stillness stirring, inexplicably,

to celebrate new life.

he Αποκαθήλωσις (Apokathelosis) ... a traditional representation of the deposition of the body of the dead Christ in Orthodox iconography



barnstorming.blog/2013/03/30/lenten-grace-be-still-and-wait/