For all our Holy Sadder Days

From D.W.: Welcome to Re-Mixtapes From Babylon. I've chosen this to be the inaugural post despite the incongruous setting of Holy Saturday. Simply, it's about loss. About overcoming through love. It's about the world ending. My world ended one year ago today. Or, that's how it felt. She describes it so much better than I could:

Facebook. April 8th. 2023

Holy Saturday, the day we don’t entirely know what to do with.  

I’ve spent a long time, years maybe, thinking about Holy Saturday, wondering about that very first one, holding it up against my own experiences of what happens the day after your idea of the world ends. Here’s part of an essay I’m working on that I think says what I want to say on this tender day.  

*** The day after the world ends, one of two things will happen. Scenario One: you wake up in whatever comes after this life. Scenario Two: you wake up still here, in this life.  

Scenario One is a single shot, and it is always major and the outcome is…deeply discussed and at present, remains unknowable. Scenario Two happens all the time, and it is universally known while rarely being discussed in polite conversation.  

Scenario Two requires us to make choices we did not imagine we would ever have to make—forces us to feel the weight of our vows, our promises, our values, our convictions, our very heart of hearts. Scenario Two confronts us with death—but not ours. I don’t just mean death of a person (but I do also mean that); I mean the death of a friendship or a kinship, the death that comes with learning a hard truth about a lie you were told, the death of certainty, the death of a dream or ambition or job. I’m talking about those moments of primal loss that flood us out and force us to restart from the mud.  

It sucks so bad.  

And we do a crap job being honest about it, about sitting with each other in those uncomfortably long and aching silences. We give lip service to talking about ways to navigate “major life stressors,” but we don’t give each other the space or grace or time to full feel those out. We rub a lot of dirt on the road-rash of our hearts, and that’s not a good remedy.  

When you wake up after the day the world ends, you’ll have a couple of seconds (maybe, unless you had a wakeful night and reminded yourself of the end of the world over and over between half-dreams of The Before Times) before your body catches up to your brain and you realize how impossible it is that the sun is shining and birds are singing and most people have no idea that your world just ended. And then you remember. It will be a very long time before that isn’t the first thing you remember on waking. Like, a long time.  

***  

But I know this much is true: the fog is not forever. As hard as it is to believe, Jesus is with us even in the fog, even as he harrows Hell itself, harrows the hardest places in our hearts. And then, with space and time, the flowers bloom.  

Love is coming. Love is here.  

—Rachie