Mary on Holy Saturday

This is the text version of a talk I shall give tomorrow, on Holy Saturday, to the Benedictine College students on their Holy Week Retreat.  Enjoy!  --Fr Jay

Mary, Teach us How to Grieve with Hope

Holy Week Retreat: Holy Saturday

April 19, 2014

We take a moment and pause at this point between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  We do not often consider Holy Saturday, since there is no Mass on this day.  There is not even a communion service today (the Vigil tonight counts for Easter Sunday).  Things are silent today.  I hope you can feel the silence of Holy Saturday.  We know what is happening: Christ descends to the abode of the dead and starting with Adam and Eve, opens the gates of heaven and leads them through.  This is all part of the spiritual warfare going on behind the scenes of the material universe.  And yet all we get in our material world is silence; we don’t even get shadows of that spiritual dimension. There is much I can say about that; but instead I want to focus on what this quiet day should mean for us.

Let’s go back for a moment to Good Friday.  Several weeks ago, at a men’s retreat from St. Michael’s parish, I reflected upon how we can be counted as the “beloved disciple” standing with Mary at the foot of the Cross.  I spoke of how early on in my spiritual life I imagined myself comforting our Blessed Mother, with my arm around her shoulders.  I reflected upon how she had to surrender her beloved Son to the Father and His will, how her fiat from the Annunciation had to be repeated many times throughout her life, culminating at the foot of the Cross.  She had to learn in little ways how to surrender, from accepting God’s will for her to become the Mother of God; from the Magi that offered myrrh, an ointment for burial, to the baby; from fleeing to Egypt and returning; from losing and finding Jesus in the temple; from her interaction with her Son at the wedding feast of Cana; from seemingly being snubbed so often when she went to see Him during His ministry; and many, many other small ways, all in preparation for that horrible Friday afternoon in a rock quarry just outside the jeering walls of Jerusalem.  And as the beloved disciple took her into his home, she may have taught him how to surrender himself, all the way to being exiled on Patmos and writing a Gospel, letters, and the book of Revelation.  Mary teaches us her lessons on surrender because she spent so much time pondering and reflecting in her pierced heart.  And we must do the same.  So I concluded with the image that I had started with, reversed: Mary’s arm is around my shoulders, comforting me, for every difficult surrender I do is mini-death and a grief, preparing me for that final surrender of my death.  Note the Hail Mary: “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”  We need her prayers so that we can surrender to the will of the Father at that moment.”

Now Mary has surrendered, she has held the body of her Son (note the Pieta), she has been taken into the home of the Beloved Disciple.  I believe she also took her Son seriously whenever He said that on the third day He must rise.  She must have heard this through the apostles, if she weren’t told of it directly from the lips of the Savior Himself.  So what was her posture on that Holy Saturday?  What was she feeling?  I think she was feeling something that may sound contradictory: grief and hope.

I think God may be asking us to peer into the heart of grief in the silence of this Holy Saturday. Some of you may not have experienced deep grief yet in your young lives, and that is fortunate. But some of you may have experienced deep grief, and it seems perhaps that we are being asked to relate our grief to the pierced heart of Mary today.  Earlier in these conferences we had been cautioned that something may bubble up within us, something the Lord wants us to face.  Revisiting a place of grief, especially a dark place in your soul in which the Lord desires to enter, may not be something you want to do right now.  In fact, as soon as you heard me relate grief to Holy Saturday, you may have had the thought, “I want to leave the room right now.”  But I ask that you persevere through to the end of this meditation, for it is about grief and hope.  “Put one blistered foot in front of the other,” as Fr. Jeremy related about a pilgrim on the Camino.  Do so with courage!  The Lord will give you His strength today. 

The loss of a loved one is heart wrenching, surreal, unnatural, sorrowful, an agony, confusing, angering, an amputation, ... the list goes on.  It is a tectonic shift in your life.  It is a horrible reality; you walk around numb for a few days or a few weeks, surprised that everyone else’s life is going on while yours just came to a screeching halt.  You want to yell at everyone and say, “My loved one just died! How could you go on?  I can’t!”  It is a strange thing that we all will experience deep grief sometime in our lives, and we human beings are still so tragically poor at handling it!  There are a meager few books written on it, and writings from the Christian faith are few, and from the Catholic faith are even fewer.  We dare to put up crucifixes on our walls and around our necks, blind to the grief that Mary and the disciples experienced just prior to the Resurrection. 

C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent little book titled A Grief Observed after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, of only four years.  He was extremely grief-stricken, even though he knew when he married her she was dying of cancer.  “Where is God?” he writes.  “Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find?  A door slammed in your face” (p. 5-6).  His faith is shaken.  He does not doubt that God exists, but he wonders rather that God is some kind of cosmic sadist, a spiteful imbecile (cf. p. 30).  “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer” (p. 7). (This is the great CS Lewis talking here!  This book was written after all the other books he wrote on the Christian faith!)  He sees his faith as a house of cards that had to be knocked down: “the sooner it was knocked down the better.  And only suffering could do it.  But then the Cosmic Sadist ... becomes an unnecessary hypothesis” (p. 38), because:

[t]he more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness.  A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety.  But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good.  The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting.  If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless.  But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us?  Well, take your choice.  The tortures occur.  If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one.  If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary.  For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.  (p. 43)

Did Mary say similar things on Holy Saturday?  Did she realize that God is a surgeon who needs to do this operation because humanity is sick?  Does surrender have to be this rough?  “Yes, I know, my Son will rise on the third day, but I want Him alive in my arms now!”  Photographs and images of loved ones are great, but they are not the real thing.  I think of this when I look at the photograph of my beloved mother who died two years ago; I well up with tears not so much because I miss her—I do!—but because the photograph just aren’t enough.  One arrives at this bitter point in the spiritual life when pictures of Jesus, stories of Jesus, statues of Jesus, and even the very matter of the Blessed Sacrament itself that we perceive isn’t enough!  Jesus, I want no more impressions of You; I simply want You!  (Lewis makes the same point on p. 65)

But I can’t have You right now.  So other things draw me in the material world.  I get tired of longing for You and not getting You right now.  I distract myself with sin.  But there, I digress.  This talk is about grief and what God does with grief in our soul, and Mary becomes our model for how to handle things when a sword pierces our own souls too.

Throughout the life of Mary we hear a refrain: “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.”  This occurred at the birth of Jesus when the shepherds came and after the finding of the child Jesus at the Temple.  I assume she continued this throughout her life.  Perhaps she did so after the wedding feast of Cana.  She surrendered the problem of the lack of wine to her Son and simply walked away.  She didn’t worry about the solution.  Perhaps she kept this incident, pondering about it in her heart, along with the mysterious words of Old Simeon and other things her Son had said throughout his life. 

Perhaps Holy Saturday for her was a time of a pondering grief.  Perhaps she reflected upon all the things Jesus said from the Cross.  Perhaps she called to mind his words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  And she continued the Twenty-second Psalm, which she knew by heart: “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?”  That sounds a lot like C.S. Lewis in his grief.  “O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”  O Mary, did you sleep last night?  I doubt if you did.  I certainly didn’t the night after my mom died.  “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel.  In you our fathers trusted; they trusted, and you delivered them.  In you they cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not disappointed.”  All right, Lord God, I shall persevere in my trust, even if I should not understand what you are up to!

There is a similar movement worth noting in the Liturgy of the Hours for Holy Saturday.  The psalms start to speak of death, but then hint at the resurrection; from mourning, to pleading with God for rescue, to the victory of eternal life over death.  Hope enters the picture, pierces through the darkness of grief, and settles in the soul like a seed, ready to sprout at the proper time.  The ground is watered with our tears, or differently expressed in Psalm 126, as the Liturgy of the Hours relates it: “They go out, they go out, full of tears, carrying seed for the sowing; they come back, they come back, full of song, carrying their sheaves.” 

Hope is a wonderful thing!  And the seed of Hope lies within grief, for grief should not be what it is if hope were not there.  It would become a different animal, more like depression or even its distant cousin, despair.  Hope is not “I hope I have a good meal tonight” or “I hope my favorite team wins the Superbowl or the World Series next time.”  Rather, the theological virtue of Hope involves keeping your eyes fixed firmly at our eternal destination, focusing on the world to come where we shall be with Jesus and—God willing—our loved ones for all eternity, no matter what happens in the world around us right now.  This kind of Hope ends up guiding us in our daily life and gives us the courage to keep pressing forward.

Can grief and hope coexist?  St Paul seems to think so.  He exhorts us that we may “not grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess 4:13).  I take that to mean that it is okay to grieve, but as long as you do so with the theological virtue of Hope. 

I think this is the kind of godly grief that Mary had between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  She grieved tremendously, no doubt about that.  But as she pondered the mystery of salvation and surrender to the Father’s will, which she had to do when the sword pierced her heart on that Friday afternoon, her grief was imbued with a sudden hope.  One weeps, simply because one misses a loved one, knowing that death is something terrible, something that simply should not be.  Each death of another is also a mini-death of the self.  The word “amputation” seems to fit.  For the tears of grief have been always described as kind of selfish, and rightly so, and it is not a bad thing to be selfish here.  Mary and Jesus were so very close; her Son was ripped out from her life and made to suffer the ugly death on the Cross.  But before we could get to the glory of the Resurrection, she had many tears to shed.  Did it have to take this much?  Did the cost have to be this steep?  Yes, for this God-made-man had to save not only His Blessed Mother but also all of humanity.  Not only did Mary have to weep, but all of creation did too.  How far we had fallen, but how far He had to come to get us back!  How could we not weep over such a prodigal God who did all that to reclaim us?

So how do we find Hope in the midst of a tremendous grief?  We do something we tremble at doing: we give it all to God.  And how do we do something that sounds so cliché?  We pray in the midst of our grief.  Most of us do not like the idea of bringing up negative things in prayer.  Most of us cringe, thinking God will be angry with us, if we bring up negative feelings in prayer, especially feelings of intense anger.  Nothing could be further from the truth!  God desires our brutal honesty, not our silence, when it comes to these “negative emotions.”  We may protest and think that God is offended by the ugliness that we harbor in our souls, yet the One who descended to the abode of the dead could easily descend to the ugliness within our souls and set us free!  I recall praying to the Lord—an honest prayer—that I didn’t want to share with him the ugly things in my soul, and I felt Him respond, “Jay, I descended to the abode of the dead; nothing could be uglier than that!”  So I began to share with Him all the ugly things in my soul, and I felt His peace come over me.  My advice to you is to never hold back in prayer!  He always cherishes and responds to honest prayer.  And especially on this day, during the silence of Holy Saturday, don’t hold back the grief in your own soul!  For when we are able to speak to Him of the ugliness of our grief—and not just speak to Him of the ugliness of our grief but also speak to Him from the ugliness of our grief—He responds with giving us enormous Hope.  He lets Hope flourish in our hearts, for He knows that’s what we need the most right now. 

Exercise: consider Mary on the morning of the Resurrection.  What was she feeling?  What was she going through?  Write or journal about it; perhaps write a prayer, a poem or even a song about it.  Let this meditation renew the theological virtue of Hope in your life.

Reference: Lewis, C.S. A Grief Observed. New York: Harper One, 1996.