Recently I returned from the Southwest, where I spent five days hiking in the Cedar Mesa wilderness. I was fascinated by the flora and fauna of the high desert, the ancestral home of the Anasazi. Each new bend in the labyrinthine canyons brought new delights, challenges, and discoveries. I welcomed the new, even as part of me resisted the changes. In this place, we re-enacted the journey of all those who experience wilderness, Exodus journeys, replete with orientation, dis-orientation, and reorientation. Less Odyssean than Abrahamic, our journey led us not back home to Ithaca, that place for which Ulysses longed, but into ever new territory. Like Abraham, for whom the final destination was uncertain, such is our journey into Lent, and an Easter whose ultimate form is a Mystery.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that one cannot step twice into the same river, and there is nothing permanent except change. William Bridges, in his book Transitions, suggests that while change is inevitable, transition is not. For Bridges, transition means accepting change, grieving what one has lost, and embracing the new.¹ Similarly, theologian Ronald Rolheiser suggests in his book, The Holy Longing, that our liturgical year contains significant wisdom about change and transition.² For Rolheiser, life is filled with “Good Friday” experiences. These may take the form of the loss of a job, divorce, death of a loved one, a health crisis, or a life cycle transition such as the empty nest. Regardless of the specific nature of the change, once it occurs there is no returning to the former way(s) of being in the world. Both Bridges and Rolheiser suggest that naming what has been, and grieving what was lost, are essential to moving on. Rolheiser stresses the importance of this liturgical wisdom in his metaphor of the Triduum as a pattern for living through such changes. We each have Good Friday experiences, and these are typically followed by Holy Saturday, a transitional time and space within which we do the good work of grieving Good Friday, even as we hope for Easter.

In his theologically persuasive text “Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday” Alan Lewis provides a compelling exegesis of “Holy Saturday” as a “boundary.”³ Using language suggestive of transitional, liminal (threshold) space, Lewis describes Holy Saturday as “the day between the days,”—a day which “unites what first it separated, and allows us to understand the Good Friday story with the pre-knowledge of its sequel, and the Easter tale in light of its preamble.” “Where better,” he asks, “to hold in equilibrium the first-time hearing of the gospel story and its constant retelling by the people of faith?”⁴

Likewise, James Farwell has suggested that this context finds expression both liturgically and theologically. Writing as an Episcopal priest, Farwell describes the Holy Saturday liturgy as a part of the Triduum for which “a very spare proper liturgy is provided in the Anglican tradition.”⁵ “The service is brief,” Farwell writes, “almost conveying a sense of bafflement at what one should do with oneself in this liminal moment. We live, stretched between suffering and salvation, living in the latter through hope, even in the midst of the former, and its pain—the very condition of humanity that we are in the process of identifying as the form of life sanctified by the Triduum liturgies as the arena of God’s work.”⁶ “In the end,” Farwell writes, “the silence of Holy Saturday points… to the Paschal Mystery.”

To provide Holy Saturday space for transition is to provide affirmation that suffering is a part of finitude, yet affirm finitude in spite of the suffering. This can be harrowing. Yet I do not mean this in the culturally familiar, pejorative sense of the term. When I was a boy, my paternal grandfather owned a hardware store in a small, middle Georgia town. Among the implements he sold was a “disc harrow,” a cylindrical blade, pulled behind a tractor, which digs into and turns over the soil in preparation for planting. Used in early spring, the disc harrow is employed in anticipation of planting, new growth, and eventual harvest. Indeed, the word “harrow” comes from the Latin Harve, or “harvest.” To harrow the soil is difficult work, yet potentially life-giving—and in this agricultural sense—”harrowing” work. Holy Saturday is harrowing, too.

The Paschal Mystery is about the ongoing reception of the Holy Spirit in the ever flourishing receiving of it here, now, in the moment at hand, a process of transition—and transformation—within which we are given both new life and new spirit. Rolheiser suggests that “It begins with suffering and death, moves on to the reception of new life, spends time grieving the old and adjusting to the new, and finally, only after the old life has been truly let go of, is new spirit given, for the life we are already given.” We might even glimpse the Baptismal promise of resurrection. Understood in this way, emotional and relational wisdom can emerge from Lenten transitions—those conflicted, contested, potentially life-giving spaces. This can transform us even as it transforms the boundaries themselves, in an ever fluid, reciprocal, and hopefully generative unfolding. In her recent poem “Mysteries, Yes” Mary Oliver expresses the ambiguous, sacred mystery of the spaces between us, and the ongoing, emergent fluidity of creation.

1. William Bridges, Transitions, (De Capo Press, 2004).
2. Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing, (New York: Doubleday Press, 1999).
3. Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday, (Grand Rapis: Eerdmans Press, 2001) p. 41.
4. Ibid, pp. 41-42.
5. James Farwell, This is the Night: Suffering, Salvation, and the Liturgies of Holy Week, (New York: T & T Clark International, 2005) pp. 68-69.
6. Ibid, pp. 68-69.
7. Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, (New York: Doubleday, 1999), p. 147.

by The Rev. Bill Harkins, Ph.D.
The Rev. Bill Harkins is Priest Associate at St. Philip’s Cathedral, Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Columbia Theological Seminary, and a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.