Three Days of Easter, Our High Holidays
Everyone loves the Sunday morning party of Easter – what’s not to love about waking up to a day that celebrates spring and new beginnings, with its playful motif of bunnies and Easter egg hunts, awash in shades of buttery yellow and palest mauve and the hope of some kind of confection before the day is through? Christian or not, it’s a day marked by the delight of new possibilities.
Ah, but the two days that proceed the Easter celebration are another matter.
Good Friday, so called. And Holy Saturday.
It takes courage and intention to sit still on Good Friday and hear again not only the dark passion story that is a cornerstone of the Christian faith, but the universal story of humanity's fearfulness and the terror that sets in when shifts in the wind herald a change in thinking for which we feel unprepared. (And we are in such a time now.)
It takes patience and intention to hold the Holy Saturday vigil, to stand in solidarity with all that is unknown and uncertain, to offer our graced attention to our faith tradition, to ourselves, to our community. This particular day, we hold vigil for Jesus and all those who stood with him, we hold vigil for all those continuing to work in our health system and essential services, we hold vigil with all those who are alone, all those in hospitals, retirement and nursing homes, all those experiencing stress in these uncertain times.
If Easter Sunday is the cheerful child in our trio of days, and Good Friday the gloomy, serious one, Holy Saturday is the quiet, overlooked one who is vitally necessary in holding all three days together.
Do not rush to the Sunday Celebration, without standing in lamentation at Friday’s funeral and Saturday’s vigil. Our high holidays are three, not one.
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing him. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”