Holy Saturday

T.S. Eliot

I said to my soul, 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; 

there is yet faith, 
but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. 

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: 
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

From East Coker, verse III

[There is something about Holy Saturday that speaks to me most especially. With its "dancing stillness" it seems the most mystical, in a way. Jesus is dead and not yet, as far as we know, resurrected. Holy Saturday is that pause between breaths, we have exhaled out, and not yet in again. We are seemingly on our own, all is silent and still, empty; everything has changed but we don’t yet understand exactly what has happened. But, obviously, God is not gone, if we know God as our very (and actual) life. Holy Saturday is perfect silence with what seems like no hope - speaking of hope in the way that T.S. Eliot does ("hope would be hope for the wrong thing"). At these times of emptiness, even darkness, only Faith will do.]