Hollow and Holy

 Some friends of ours are in the middle of remodeling their house. A few weeks ago they gave us a tour of the changes and shared a discovery they’d made in the basement. If you tap on the cement floor in one small area it sounds hollow. They demonstrated with a few quick taps in the area and sure enough, there it was. Unmistakable. Everyone knows what hollow sounds like. It’s that Empty, vacant, the wind knocked out of you kind of sound. Maybe hollow feels like that, too. You’re familiar with it. If you’ve been alive these last weeks you might be particularly attuned to the nuances of what hollow feels like. You might be wandering around grasping at the nothing and wondering, “where did everything go?” Some of us have a glowing imagination and have been dreaming our way back to normal. Some are stunned into stillness or lashing out in anger. Others of us are completely familiar with hollow. You’ve been here a long time, waiting wondering if the rest of us will ever show up. Whatever your strategy, we’re all dealing with what hollow feels like and none of us know when or how it’s going to end. 

In preparation for Holy Week during this (my very first) pandemic I’ve thought through the stories we remember in these days- Jesus washing the disciples feet, then hanging on the cross, breathing his last, then some days later, filling his lungs again and leaving behind an empty tomb. In the middle of it all I noticed a curious anticipation for today, what many Christians call Holy Saturday. That withdrawn day that sits silently between Jesus’ death and his mysterious return to life. It usually slips by without much attention. Lost under the weight of Good Friday or behind the brilliance of Easter Sunday. It is an unmistakably hollow day. A day to remind us that just after our stories succumb to their afflictions and long before any new way emerges there are the dark, gasping days where all is adversary and our lives are only here, only now. Holy Saturday has got my attention this year. 

The empty, the lack, the not knowing of today all seem in some way essential, even while remaining mysterious. Holy Saturday is emerging to me as a crucial way that we work to avoid but that continually brings us to a reckoning with the parts of our stories we’ve cut off as useless, as failure, as nothing. Perhaps Holy Saturday is pedagogy for a people who cling to the belief that nothingness is worthless.

Maybe Jesus’ hours in the tomb on Saturday tell a new story about what we name nothing? “In order to arrive there,” T.S. Eliot tells us in East Coker,

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,

You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.”

In order to arrive at what you do not know

    You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

    You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

    You must go through the way in which you are not

I wonder if Jesus stayed in that tomb on Saturday to enter, “the way wherein there is no ecstasy,” to enfold “the way of ignorance” and, “dispossession,” to be present to, “the way in which you are not.” Maybe, just maybe, Jesus enters that place of absence to call it, of all things, Holy and bring it and all it means into the Way of Christ.

Don’t rush Holy Saturday for the sake of Easter Sunday this year. Take a seat here, in the hollow, gasping now and wait with Christ for the hope of new life. Welcome to Holy Saturday.