Holy Saturday (or Dark Saturday) is traditionally a day of waiting, prayer and fasting. Symbolically, Christians wait at the tomb in which Jesus was buried, meditating on his Passion and Death and anticipating resurrection. Mass is not celebrated on Holy Saturday. Candles remain extinguished and altars remain bare.
What are we waiting for? Why do we fast? What desperate prayers are we intoning? What life is possible after death?
The Easter story is so familiar to most of us that perhaps it is easy to dismiss the defeat of this Saturday. This was, after all, when everything had already ended. The good people had lost and the bad ones hardly noticed. All hope had been replaced by… extinction.
Whatever your theories of atonement and however you understand the history or mythology of the resurrection, today let us just remember that it all ended.
Perhaps this might help too. Katie Cross pointed us towards this picture:
This is Georgia O’Keeffe’s ‘Grey Cross on Blue’, which Katie had encountered in a museum in New Mexico.
O’Keeffe was painting in the 1920’s, on a search for an older, more authentic America. The wild lanscape of New Mexico, often split by the many crosses of all shapes and sizes that had been erected there, was a constant theme of her painting. Beyond the cross, there is something else however…
The blue reflects the sky and the Blue Lake or Ba Whyea, an ancient sacred site for the Native American Taos Pueblo community: taospueblo.com/blue-lake/
It was not until the 1970’s that this sacred site was returned to the Taos people.
President Nixon stated, “This is a bill that represents justice, because in 1906 an injustice was done in which land involved in this bill, 48,000 acres, was taken from the Indians involved, the Taos Pueblo Indians.
The Congress of the United States now returns that land to whom it belongs … I can’t think of anything more appropriate or any action that could make me more proud as President of the United States.”
That signing restored Taos Pueblo lands and led to the unhindered continuation of the Pueblo’s millenniums-old traditional culture. It also set a precedent for self-determination for all American Indian people, tribes and nations.
Here is a story of death.
Here is a kind of resurrection.
