Holy Saturday: Holding Space.

An invitation to pause, to (re)visit, to garden, to ponder and to share.

This is the seventh of our Passion Week Consolations 2025. You can find all posts here.
If you are new here and wish to receive our daily consolations in your inbox you can still sign up here choosing the paid tier. You can also give this journey as a gift to a loved one.

Signs of Spring :-)

Dear fellow pilgrim,

This Passion week I felt dry and often disconnected from that well from which I usually write. And though I have written for you in the morning dew each day, I also borrowed sections and phrases from the growing archives of our Passion Week Consolations more than usual, in order to offer you smooth pieces instead of fragments.

But may be I should have offered you my stuttering, my not knowing, my difficulties instead?

Maybe you, too, walked this week under shadows?

Numb from emotional overload?

Maybe you didn’t show up to all the practices you’d hoped for.

May be you just arrived here.

Maybe your soul longed for something you couldn’t reach?

That’s okay. This, too, is the journey.

The sacred shows up even when we’re not ready.

The sacred unfolds in the in-between.

So on this Holy Saturday, as we enter this suspended space between death and resurrection, darkness and light, I will be reading this week’s Consolations again, this time for myself, as if for the first time. You’re invited to do the same. Whether you’ve followed each day or not at all, you’re welcome to carve out a bit of space, to listen, to return to the path. No guilt. No pressure. Just presence.

Revisiting our Consolations also allows you to see the notes your fellow pilgrims have left there.

So below I share five things from my heart with you today:

• a lamentation about the state of the world, as fragmented as it is,

• a retreat to the garden,

• a reminder of our pilgrimage together,

• ending with a lullaby from JS Bach’s Passion.

• And finally, some journaling questions also.

#1. What if the state of today’s world is our Passion journey?

While I was visiting the Good Friday night service in a local church, following the invitation to sit with Christ’s suffering and the suffering of the world, it dawned on me.

May be it wasn’t so much that I was distracted by the news this passion week?

Perhaps sitting with the suffering of this world wasn’t a distraction but part of this passion journey?

May be what we witness in the world and here in North America is the embodiment of Christ’s passion, repeating time and again where the innocent are trampled and truth is crucified?

From this inspiration comes my lament for this world:

Nails at the cross

I bring

the suffering of the innocent

I bring Garcia,

the children of Gaza,

the pain of the Holy land,

and the war in Ukraine

I bring

world leaders who mock the truth and

trample human dignity

I bring

twisted powers suppressing the life blood of the people

I bring my feelings of helplessness, and fear

to the cross.

Here I will wait

for hope to break through.

…

Have you written a lament this week or these days? Feel free to share it with us today in the comments.

#2. Retreating to the garden

Every day of this passion week I have been taking refuge to the garden, watching the bleeding heart grow, literally. Out of dry leaves and last year’s wood, she stretches up, tender and red-stemmed, already crowned with the promise of bloom. And so watching Spring enfold adds some more lines to my meditation:

Out of the husks of last year’s grief,
the bleeding heart is rising.

She pushes through curled leaves and cracked stems,
carrying the memory of frost,
but also something more—a red, living stem reaching toward light.

I almost didn’t notice her.
I’ve been so caught in what I didn’t do this week.
The reflections I didn’t freshly write.
The monastery I didn’t go to.
The communion I missed.

But here she is. Growing anyway.

Maybe that’s what Holy Saturday is about?

Not what we managed to say, or plan, or perform,
but what still dares to grow from the tomb?

Maybe today, I will just sit
waiting for the green to emerge.

May be today I will march for truth to break through.

#3. (Re)visiting the path

If you have been walking with us all week, or if you just recently joined our pilgrimage, you might want to look back to a consolation or musical selection that most moved you (here you can find all the consolations together in lovely communion waiting for you).

You can think of the Consolations almost like stations of the cross, one visits and revisits quietly, walking by some with a nod, but sitting down with, pondering on, sinking into some others.

Rather than reading through them all quickly, create your own retreat by spending some time with two or three that seem best fitted to your need today.

If you long for a community to be held on this day, you can read and respond to our community conversation which you find under each post you visit online. Have a journal near by. Write down what stirs up in you.

For example, you might wish to join our heart-felt table conversation we had on Maundy Thursday.

Chuck and I are here for you and respond to each comment.

If you have only time for one Consolation you might want to choose the one from Sunday, offering the historic recording of Bach’s Aria “Have Mercy” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It might be the most fitting for a day like this.

Look at our journey together. It always surprises me that out of fragments and loose ends a new journey is born.

#4. Ending with a lullaby