Today is a barren day, and day of waiting. The pain and bitterness of yesterday is over; Christ is buried in the tomb and there is a quietness that is full of anticipation.
We wait and we pray.
This gap between two great liturgical events of the year in many ways represents the Christian life as a whole. For those around the dead Jesus, the disciples and his mother, all his followers, today was a terrible day. He is dead, buried. They do not have the knowledge that we have: that he rose on the third day. The Christian life is bursting with unknowing. In fact, the greatest spiritual difficulties arise only when we begin to think that we know. The Saints courted unknowing, they entered into it and accepted that they were inside a mystery, The greatest spiritual mystics did not have answers on that scale. Instead, they did two things: they waited and they prayed. Our lives can be a mystery; we can worry about where we are going, about what is going to happen. But we can return, whenever we like, to the memory of Holy Saturday, in which we simply wait in a state of unknowing. It is the ultimate day of placing ourselves in God’s hands.