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           A Holy Saturday Reflection for 2023

Rev. Elder Miller Jen Hoffman

A vigil among other things is a time of keeping awake, being attentive and present. It holds anticipation, perhaps, and is often in waiting for a holiday or observance; and it need not anticipate. Perhaps this vigil is most powerful not waiting, not knowing, merely being, so that we do not skip too quickly or too shallowly to victory. So that we truly rest in and collect ourselves together in a time of not knowing, unsure and in need. So that we are fully present with this time of sabbath, silence, and sorrow. 

This day was then and is now a deeply and uniquely Jewish day of rest that calls its people to zakar, to remember, and to qadash, to set it apart. It is remarkable that the Mark gospel remains silent about this sabbath, so much more so after detailing each other day of the week, so much more after detailing the previous day in 3-hour increments. This silence is echoed in the Nicene Creed which, unlike the Apostles Creed, does not name the harrowing, skips from Friday to Sunday, and brings to my mind the number of times throughout gospel accounts of Jesus that he and his followers retreated, went away, withdrew – to a certain place, in a house, beside the lake, to a mountainside, to a quiet place.

This day, unforgettably, inexorably, is filled with sorrow, reflected in our lectionary selections from Job 14 or Lamentations 3. This is perhaps what we are uniquely called to be present with today, to rest into in community and history. More perhaps than a single day of an annual season, perhaps today calls us to remember and connect, to rest into and be present with our grief and trauma as it comes unpredictably, repeatedly, even now from prejudice and oppression by design as well as from the cycles of our daily, lived experiences of loss. 

We need not vigil alone. In the gospels stories, Jesus often did not retreat alone. A well-known Buddhist parable tells that, after losing her only child, Kisa Gotami became desperate and asked if anyone could help her. her sorrow was so great that many thought she had lost her mind. an old man told her to see the buddha. the buddha told her that he could bring the child back to life if she could find white mustard seeds from a family where no one had died. she desperately went from house to house, but to her disappointment, she could not find a house that had not suffered the death of a family member. Finally the realization struck her that there is no house free from mortality. 

Buddhist author and teacher Sharon Salzberg instructs that what Gotami came to see what that she was not alone in her suffering. By realizing that all share experiences of loss and death, Kisa Gautami joined the whole again; she became part of something rather than feeling separate from it, and this freed her heart to have compassion for herself and compassion for all beings. Pema Chodron calls this “Things falling apart” and notes that it is ongoing, “a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

I hope there is something here that resonates for you, for your family or community, in our and your grief and loss. Surviving violence. On this day and every day, the Council of Elders offers you breath and balance. Peace.