Category Archives: Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday: waiting…

-Shroud of Turin


-by James Hanvey, SJ, holds the Lo Schiavo Chair in Catholic Social Thought at the University of San Francisco.

“We tend to think of Holy Saturday as a day ‘in between’ Good Friday and Easter Sunday, without any particular significance of its own. But this could not be further from the truth. It is a day that resists all of our attempts to understand it, but nonetheless we must ‘live in the realities of Holy Saturday’.

We don’t know what to do with it. Somehow it gets lost between the solemn exhaustion of Good Friday and the excitement of the Easter Vigil. Yet it is not an interlude between acts while the scenery changes behind the curtain. Neither is it a time when God continues to work in some other realm of redemption like the descent into Hell. All that can be done, all that needs to be done, is done on the cross. We must not run away from its finality. It is over; all our lives we will be discovering the depths of that closure. We cannot even begin to appreciate what it means if we do not live in the realities of Holy Saturday. Without the experience of this day neither our hearts nor minds, not even our souls, are prepared for Good Friday or Easter Morning.

It is only human to want to avoid the vast silence of this day, its stillness which stretches out without any promise of relief. It is only human to want to shake off the finality, the shock and numbness of death, to release ourselves from the lingering memory of what we have witnessed. It is only human to want to flee from its emptiness, the stark, hard, unyielding bareness of absence. So we run – either physically, through activity, preparing for the holidays, making things ready for the liturgy; or intellectually and spiritually by anticipating the consolations of Easter. However we do it, we want to escape the aftermath of death, God’s death, and the vacuum which refuses to be resolved or dissolved. On Holy Saturday we all become Pelagians finding every good excuse to make something happen. In the dead time that lies between Good Friday and Easter Sunday we encounter the terror of our own impotence. There is no magic, no word, no clever formula to bring Him back; to restore the dream and secure the hope. We go on living but can we trust life again? Can we trust ourselves again?

We should mourn and start the rituals of grieving for all the unlived lives, all our own unlived lives. But even then Holy Saturday resists all our attempts to change it, to naturalize and interpret it in some sort of therapeutic framework. It is a different sort of time, one that does not move to our rhythms. This day holds us in its bleak starkness. It is not only the trauma of a tortured, disfigured, broken and lifeless body, or the scandal of goodness and innocence systematically dismembered and destroyed. Even the loving rituals of a hasty burial or the familiar routines of religious piety and festival cannot lessen it. Memory cannot leap over the reality of Good Friday to return to happier times. Memory, too, is held disoriented, dislocated and disconnected, a refugee lost in the alien land of Holy Saturday. Deep in the folds of our own bruised and shocked souls moves another more sinister and primal fear. Like a black serpent sensing the closeness of its prey, quietly it uncoils within us, poised to strike: the terror of Death.

This is not death through natural causes. It does not come at the end of a natural process or a long life. Its very unnaturalness shatters all our attempts to make it comprehensible and familiar. It is an inflicted death which reveals the terror of ultimate power: death itself can be instrumentalized. The cross, its torture and humiliation, was the deliberate and ruthless manifestation of Roman power, but it is also the symbol of every regime which makes death its instrument. Not only is this a physical death, it is death as claim and possession; it is death which advertises complete ownership. It makes the body of the victim its own symbol and inscribes its name upon flesh, bone and muscle. ‘You are ours. Here, you see what we can do, if we choose.’

Now the State, the Emperor, the President or the CEO performs the liturgy of their power in the spectacle of a systematic, calculated and carefully controlled death. It is meant to be public spectacle because it is meant to serve subjection through terror. Its purpose is not just to generate bodily compliance, but to coloniZe the imagination and the soul. This is not just the reduction of the will to impotence, but the rendition of being itself to the dark country of which death is only the threshold: the abyss of nothingness and the hell of living without life, of being only a property. We are allowed the illusion of our freedom; to get on with our lives and maybe even prosper, but only on the condition that we acknowledge the gods who can sacrifice us at will on the altar of death.

Only in the silence of Holy Saturday can we see the true terror of the cross. It exposes the ultimate source of the secular gods’ power – the god of this world, the god of despair; the god who can crucify God. On this day, all our dreams fall away, our hopes scatter like dust in the wind; the fragile world we build of meaning, of goodness, of love, is only a poor, ragged shelter in which to hide from the frozen dark of an endless night. If we have the courage to place our ear to the silence of Holy Saturday we will hear a savage laughter. It is the gods of this world laughing at our hope for a savior.

There is also the guilt: could we have done something? In the space of Holy Saturday we have to live with all our betrayals. Even when we have loved to the end, even when we have taken the risks and keep our vigil before the cross, even when we have taken the body and laid it to rest, it is not enough. Our love, our loyalty, all our skill and ingenuity, is not enough. It cannot save him. On Holy Saturday we live the limits of our love. We do not stop loving, but even though our love may be endless, we know it cannot be enough. We love now in pain, in longing; we love now on the cross of our own finiteness.

If we enter into the silence of Holy Saturday, its bareness gives us no distractions. There is nowhere to go but inwards; into the very empty places of our own soul and imagination. Holy Saturday takes us beyond grief and mourning into the deepest purification of our faith. Like the bare altar and the empty tabernacle, this Saturday strips us of all comfort. It even strips away faith itself, leaving us so utterly naked and impotent that we can only wait.

If we can stay in this strange and desolate place waiting, our spiritual eyes become accustomed to this other dimension. We will begin to discern that it has brought us to a way that only Christ has opened up. In the very waiting and living in our own powerlessness, we have already faced the terror of the instruments, the torture, the primal fear that laid its claim upon us. If only we can stay there waiting we will begin to understand that this silence and emptiness is not God’s powerlessness, His death – but His Sabbath: it is an end; it is a completion and it is also a new beginning. It is truly a ‘holy’ Saturday, not an interlude but a hallowing of all of our times of waiting. Without it we would never see into the depths of Good Friday or adjust our understanding to grasp the magnitude and meaning of Easter morning.

In the emptiness of waiting, we begin to learn something that the god of this world cannot bear, the knowledge that it does not want us to know: at the very point of our failure and betrayals, when we taste our own impotence and limit, if we are not afraid to live in His absence, we discover Him.

Holy Saturday is His time. It is the time when we learn to trust His sacrifice of love which death can neither subjugate nor comprehend. In Holy Saturday we begin to see that it is He who has made death His instrument; not to terrorize us into submission, but to call us more intimately to His side. In the purifying darkness of Holy Saturday we discover the Sabbath of our waiting. We come to the end of our way and the beginning of His. It is only Christ Who can carry us over into Easter morning, and so it is with all the Holy Saturdays of our life.”

Love, and the silence of Holy Saturday,
Matthew

Tenebrae

-“Tenebrae Factae Sunt”, There was darkness, is the eighth responsorio for Holy Week and the fifth responsorio of Matins for Good Friday.

-from https://www.sistersofcarmel.com/tenebrae.php?mc_cid=3ff5951ea0&mc_eid=c72ad7923a

“All that You have done to us, O Lord, You have done in true judgment, because we have sinned against You, and have not obeyed Your commandments. But give glory to Your name, and deal with us according to the multitude of Your mercy.”
– Daniel, 3:31, from the Mass of Thursday in Passion Week

“Tenebrae”, means shadows, and is the name given to the service of Matins and Lauds belonging to the last three days of Holy Week. It differs, in many things, from the Office of the rest of the year. All is sad and mournful, as though it were a funeral service; nothing could more emphatically express the grief that now weighs down the heart of our holy Mother the Church. Throughout all the Office of Thursday, Friday and Saturday, she forbids herself the use of those formulas of joy and hope wherewith, on all other days, she begins her praise of God. Nothing is left but what is essential to the form of the Divine Office: psalms, lessons and chants expressive of grief. The tone of the whole Office is most noticeably mournful: the lessons taken from the Lamentations of Jeremias, the omission of the Gloria Patri, of the Te Deum, and of blessings etc., so the darkness of these services seems to have been designedly chosen to mark the Church’s desolation. The lessons from Jeremias in the first Nocturn, those from the Commentaries of St. Augustine upon the Psalms in the second, and those from the Epistles of St. Paul in the third remain now as when we first hear of them in the eighth century.

The name “Tenebrae” has been given because this Office is celebrated in the hours of darkness, formerly in the evening or just after midnight, now the early morning hours. There is an impressive ceremony, peculiar to this Office, which tends to perpetuate its name. There is placed in the sanctuary, near the altar, a large triangular candlestick holding fifteen candles. At the end of each psalm or canticle, one of these fifteen candles is extinguished, but the one which is placed at the top of the triangle is left lighted. During the singing of the Benedictus (the Canticle of Zachary at the end of Lauds), six other candles on the altar are also put out. Then the master of ceremonies takes the lighted candle from the triangle and holds it upon the altar while the choir repeats the antiphon after the canticle, after which she hides it behind the altar during the recitation of the Christus antiphon and final prayer. As soon as this prayer is finished, a noise is made with the seats of the stalls in the choir, which continues until the candle is brought from behind the altar, and shows, by its light, that the Office of Tenebrae is over.

Let us now learn the meaning of these ceremonies. The glory of the Son of God was obscured and, so to say, eclipsed, by the ignominies He endured during His Passion. He, the Light of the world, powerful in word and work, Who but a few days ago was proclaimed King by the citizens of Jerusalem, is now robbed of all his honors. He is, says Isaias, the Man of sorrows, a leper (Isaias 53:3,4). He is, says the royal prophet, a worm of the earth, and no man (Psalm 21:7). He is, as He says of himself, an object of shame even to his own disciples, for they are all scandalized in Him (Mark 14:27) and abandon Him; yea, even Peter protests that he never knew Him. This desertion on the part of His apostles and disciples is expressed by the candles being extinguished, one after the other, not only on the triangle, but on the altar itself. But Jesus, our Light, though despised and hidden, is not extinguished. This is signified by the candle which is momentarily placed on the altar; it symbolizes our Redeemer suffering and dying on Calvary. In order to express His burial, the candle is hidden behind the altar; its light disappears. A confused noise is heard in the house of God, where all is now darkness. This noise and gloom express the convulsions of nature when Jesus expired on the cross: the earth shook, the rocks were split, the dead came forth from their tombs. But the candle suddenly reappears; its light is as fair as ever. The noise is hushed, and homage is paid to the Conqueror of death.”

– Excerpted from the revered Liturgical Year by Abbot Gueranger, the Catholic Encyclopedia and other sources

Love & Resurrection,
Matthew

Vere Languores Nostros – Truly He bore our griefs, Service of Tenebrae, Holy Thursday, (III Responsory of I Nocturn)


-please click on the image for more detail

Vere languores nostros ipse tulit,
et dolore nostros ipse portavit;
Cujus livore sanati sumus.
Dulce lignum, dulces clavos,
dulcia ferens pondera,
quae sola fuisti digna
sustinere Regem coelorum et Dominum.

Truly He bore our griefs,
and carried our sorrows;
by His wounds we are healed.
Sweet cross, sweet nails,
sweetly bearing the weight,
you alone were worthy
to bear the King of heaven and the Lord.

Love,
Matthew

Tenebrae Factae Sunt – Darkness Fell: Responsory for 2nd nocturn of Good Friday

Tenebrae factae sunt, dum crucifixissent Jesum Judaei:
et circa horam nonam exclamavit Jesus voce magna:
Deus meus, ut quid me dereliquisti?
Et inclinato capite, emisit spiritum.
V. Exclamans Jesus voce magna ait: Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.
Et inclinato capite, emisit spiritum.

Darkness fell when the Jews crucified Jesus:
and about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
And he bowed his head and gave up the ghost.
V. Jesus cried with a loud voice and said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
And he bowed his head and gave up the ghost.

Love,
Matthew

Holy Saturday – “Something strange is happening…”, The Harrowing of Hell

jesus-sealed-tomb

-from the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday, 2nd reading

“Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and He has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.

He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, He has gone to free from sorrow the captives Adam and Eve, He Who is both God and the son of Eve. The Lord approached them bearing the cross, the weapon that had won Him the victory. At the sight of Him Adam, the first man He had created, struck his breast in terror and cried out to everyone: “My Lord be with you all.” Christ answered him: “And with your spirit.” He took him by the hand and raised him up, saying: “Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.”

I am your God, Who for your sake have become your son. Out of love for you and for your descendants I now by My own authority command all who are held in bondage to come forth, all who are in darkness to be enlightened, all who are sleeping to arise. I order you, O sleeper, to awake. I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. Rise from the dead, for I am the life of the dead. Rise up, work of My hands, you who were created in My image. Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in Me and I am in you; together We form only One Person and We cannot be separated.

For your sake I, your God, became your son; I, the Lord, took the form of a slave; I, Whose home is above the heavens, descended to the earth and beneath the earth. For your sake, for the sake of man, I became like a man without help, free among the dead. For the sake of you, who left a garden, I was betrayed to the Jews in a garden, and I was crucified in a garden.

See on my face the spittle I received in order to restore to you the life I once breathed into you. See there the marks of the blows I received in order to refashion your warped nature in My image. On My back see the marks of the scourging I endured to remove the burden of sin that weighs upon your back. See My hands, nailed firmly to a tree, for you who once wickedly stretched out your hand to a tree.

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly paradise. I will not restore you to that paradise, but I will enthrone you in heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I Who Am Life Itself am now One with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The Kingdom of Heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.”


-fresco, by Fra Angelico, c. 1430s

Love & blessed waiting,
Matthew

Holy Thursday, Tenebrae, III Responsory of I Nocturn – Vere Languores Nostros

Isaiah 53:4-5

Vere languores nostros ipse tulit,
et dolore nostros ipse portavit;
Cujus livore sanati sumus.
Dulce lignum, dulces clavos,
dulcia ferens pondera,
quae sola fuisti digna
sustinere Regem coelorum et Dominum.

Truly He bore our griefs,
and carried our sorrows;
by His wounds we are healed.
Sweet cross, sweet nails,
sweetly bearing the weight,
you alone were worthy
to bear the King of heaven and the Lord.

Love,
Matthew