Sitting a while in the shadow of Easter Saturday

I’m posting this a little early, ahead of Easter Saturday. Mostly because I feel like we’re already living in Easter Saturday mode, most days. This is a reflection rooted in my own faith, which is also the reason why I care so much about climate justice. No apologies for it! They’re deeply interlinked for me. I’ve been thinking about the quiet, uneasy space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday… the part we often rush past. This piece is about what it means to sit a while in that shadow—and what we might find there.

I attended church today at my former church in Shoeburyness. The pastor, almost as an aside as we considered what is yet to come in Easter week, spoke of something that landed deeply and so I have written about it in my new effort to try and capture words on the page.

The pastor, Rev Alan Brand, talked about the way, in our Christian traditions, we so often mark Good Friday, the day where we remember Jesus’ death. And then we skip ahead to Easter Sunday. The day we celebrate resurrection, life anew. A day of hallelujahs.

But, as he pointed out, we skip over Easter Saturday.

We skip the limbo space. The thin place between death and life. We fast-forward a day, bypassing the ache and the uncertainty.

But as Alan Brand rightly pointed out, there needs to be a space made for the grief. For the not knowing.

On Easter Saturday, Jesus’ friends and family did not know Easter Sunday was coming. It wasn’t called Easter at all. All they knew was loss. Numbness. The disorienting quiet that follows catastrophe. The dark. And not the dark with a candle flickering in the night, but the suffocating blackness of a vacuum where nothing makes sense. Anyone who has ever truly grieved knows it. The moment you feel you can’t breathe. The moment everything hurts with grief, even your bones.

And I can’t help but feel—we are living in Easter Saturday times.

For those who are not of faith, or not of my faith, I might describe this as ‘an in-between’ time. But I am of faith. And these are times, I think, where the sacred is leaking in. And what is more sacred than the in-between?

I can’t find secular words that well enough sum this up because to me God is there in the gap. In the desert space. The empty space. The void. And it is in the void that all of us—whether faithful or doubting or somewhere unsure—must find a way to hold on to hope, to the belief that a new day will follow. Even when we cannot see it. And that is what faith is I think. Hope in that yet uncertain and unseen. But more than that, hope in that which has not even been sown as an idea. Hoping that beyond the suffocating darkness there is light, even when it can’t be seen.

So perhaps we need to create space to sit a while in the gap. In the Easter Saturday pause. Not because it is comfortable, but precisely because it is not. Because it stretches us. Because it reminds us that hope is not always light and triumphant. Sometimes hope is quiet. Sometimes hope is staying.

Staying with the silence.

Staying with the rupture.

Staying when there are no answers.

Staying when the story doesn’t make sense.

I believe this is where something begins to stir. A kind of holy imagination that cannot be accessed in the rush to resolution. One not rooted in certainty, but in the willingness to be reshaped by its opposite. The not knowing. When we do not know, what is left but dreams?

It is in the pause we’d rather skip that new worlds can be conceived. Not by bridging over the void, but by being present to it. Not built on bypassing pain, but on honouring it. Not by leaping to the miracle, but by lingering in the tomb.

Perhaps this is the sacred work of Easter Saturday. And it might just be the work of our time too.

In our eagerness to address the climate and nature crisis sometimes we skip straight to the bad future or the good future in our prophecies and our science. And science matters, it tells us where we are. But instead of running from it towards something else perhaps we need to pause in the discomfort a while to allow that sacred work to take place. This isn’t a sticking plaster scenario we can leapfrog our way out of. But God is in this void too. God is also with all who grieve lost friends and family, lost to this disaster, lost to other disasters. Our lost dead, and our lost who are yet living.

So this coming Saturday, inspired by Alan’s challenge to mark Easter Saturday, I am going to hold space not for answers, but for the void and for the painful questions that have no solution or resolution. Yet.