Interlude: Holy Saturday

Today is the strangest day of the liturgical year. Holy Saturday is a quiet day, a day of transition that point of balance between what has been and what will be. If you enter a Catholic Church today it should feel empty, dark, like a tomb. The tabernacle is empty, the altar is stripped, there are no flowers or extraneous decorations, no holy water, etc.

In the context of the sacred Triduum, the three days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday, between our celebration of the Lord's Passion and tonight's Vigil, we've hit a pause.

In an essay entitled "Descent Into Hell" from the fourth volume of his Explorations in Theology, subtitled Spirit and Institution, Hans Urs Von Balthasar noted that "Holy Saturday is thus a kind of suspension, as it were, of the Incarnation, whose result is given back to the hands of the Father and which the Father will renew and definitively confirm by the Easter Resurrection."

This pause is not incidental. It is intentional. It is vital, that is, life-giving. For those whose lives permit, Holy Saturday can be a pause, a time for silence, recollection. A holy day, made sacred by silence.

As to the Paschal Mystery of Christ's death and resurrection, what is happening liturgically, mystagogically on Holy Saturday is liminal.

The second reading for today's Office of Readings is from a well-known ancient and anonymous homily for Holy Saturday. It is about Christ's descent into hell. In this dramatic telling, once in the netherworld, Christ's spirit seeks out that of Adam. Upon finding our first parent, tells him, referring to his body lying in the tomb- "My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell."

Iesvs Nazarenevs Rex Ivdaeorvm, by Henry Augustin Valentin, 19th cent.