Through the church year Saint Francis seems propelled along by a low-grade but frenetic kind of activity. We give generously of our time and mind to so many outreach efforts, the programmatic linchpin of which is Potomac Country House Tour. We swing into Advent and speed into Christmas. We attend Epiphany and Lent adult forums, Bible studies, and feeding programs of one kind (outreach) or another (catered or covered-dish dinners). We march through the endless season of Pentecost with sermons, programs, and missions. Holy Week, which ought to be the most meditative time of our year, jangles with stressful busyness.

Only on Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter, does the hum of this activity seem to abate. When asked about Holy Week, most clergy will tell you how busy they are except for Saturday. At Saint Francis, nothing much is going on in the church until the Easter Eve Service of Holy Baptism at 4 o’clock that afternoon. Yes, the choir is rehearsing, the Altar Guild is doing last minute chores and the Flower Guild is putting their potted splendor in place. But other than that, the church is quiet.

The building itself seems to witness to this claim. I’ve always found the emptiness of the church on Holy Saturday palpable, the silence deafening. We’ve stripped the altar, put away all our graven images, veiled the crosses. Even the tabernacles are empty, their doors left open. The morning’s liturgy only deepens the emptiness and silence. Contained on a single page of our Prayer Book, minimal, it defies any sermon or commentary. We begin without introduction, we recite the Psalms without a Gloria, we end without Communion, we depart without reverence. Few people come, and many of those who do are there for other reasons.

But the early Church Fathers and the Eastern Church have always had a different understanding of this day. According to tradition, on Holy Saturday, Jesus Christ, true God and true man, entered into the realm of the dead. On Holy Saturday, during the hours between Jesus’ death and his Resurrection, all creation altered.

The Church has grappled with this tradition in a variety of metaphors, some quite mythological. We speak of the Harrowing of Hell and picture Jesus pulling Adam and Eve from the jaws of hell in a bizarre and cosmic tug-of-war. As Dante and Virgil clamber down deeper into the Inferno, they encounter landslides and crumbled bridges, signs of Christ’s earlier descent into this godless land. All these metaphors, however crudely, attempt to convey the most astounding mystery of our faith, that in his death Jesus became one with all those who had lost their way from God. Jesus died not only for you and me, active sinners. Jesus died for all those sunk in mental darkness, immobilized by spiritual rebellion, dead to grace.

The concrete nature of Holy Saturday forbids us from turning this mystery into facile optimism. It confronts us with the bare brutality of a corpse, silence, a pitch dark tomb and nothing else. Christians have always lived uneasily with this brutality. Certain evangelicals move quickly from Good Friday to Easter Morning, reducing the drama to a simple fiduciary transaction between Jesus and God the Father. Liberal Christians collapse the drama into the shallow simile of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. But neither tactic works. Both are shallow, trite. Few claims are more obscene than that Jesus’ victory is as simple as the finale of a Broadway musical. Silence proves to be the only serviceable metaphor we possess.

I’ve come to appreciate Holy Saturday more than any other day in the Christian year. Bereft of symbols, stripped of clerical functions, deprived of all excuses to be busy, I must confront the fact that the depth of redemption’s drama cannot be seen by the human eye except in shadowy images. That it is ultimately played out down in the heart of evil, and that our task as Christians is to wait in hard won hope. An early Christian homily depicts Holy Saturday as the initial, unsettling tremors of a mighty earthquake. With each Holy Saturday, I value this image more.

The silent church. The distant footfalls of some Altar Guild member trying to get a job done quickly. The lack of God where God promised to dwell. Holy Saturday and the Feast of the Ascension both confront us with detachment: in the one instance by Jesus being taken away in death, and in the other, by Jesus being taken up into glory. All ministry in Christ’s name, everything for me to do as a priest, finds its life and its purpose in those leavetakings.