A DAY CALLED HOLY

There’s a reason why today is called “holy.” And yet Holy Saturday is so often forgotten, skipped over, rushed through. It becomes a day of planning for Easter celebrations: eggs and baskets and chocolate. But Holy Saturday is a day unto itself—a day of prayer and reflection and revelation. Holy Saturday is a day of getting back to the ordinary.

What does that mean? Again, we must remind ourselves that we know how the story ends. We walk through Good Friday expecting the joys of Easter, the triumph of the risen Christ. But for those who accompanied Jesus until the end, this was a day of accepting defeat, a day of realizing failure. It was a day to begin rebuilding. A day to start getting back to the daily necessities of life.

And it was a day of hard choices. Was God still there? Was there still something to hope in? Or was all really lost?

For many of us, Holy Saturday is where we spend countless days of our lives—and that’s okay. It’s a day of wrestling with the path God has laid out for us. It’s a day of wrestling with suffering, poverty, hunger and devastation. And it’s a day of commitment: to continue on through what many of us know to be the highs and lows of ordinary life, trusting that God never abandons us.

That commitment is what makes us holy. That commitment is what enables us to truly participate in the joy of the risen Christ.