Easter Saturday

Easter Saturday and all is quiet, the clouds holding the sky like a muffler.  The colours of the flowers are dimmed, there is a snail sitting on a leaf of the wallflower and gulls fill the interstices of the silence with their warnings.  It is the waiting day, the day when the broken egg of dreams has seeped away and all hope seems hidden.  It is a day when the grief and questions of yesterday cannot run their measure but sit tight on the chest like a box.  For it is Sabbath, it is God’s day, and he has the key which he will turn at first light tomorrow.

What do we do with waiting days when we cannot rush to the scene of our sorrow?  Do we pummel the air with words, or wrap the blanket of emotion around us like a skin?  Can we attend to anything, or are we trapped in a timewarp like a tunnel, waiting to touch the source of our pain, to bathe the body of death with our perfume?  Can we feel the God who holds us, sharing our tears, offering the cauterising of peace if we would accept it?

When our interior world is in melt down we don’t easily see the external, we walk in our wound not in the world.  But there is a hospital for the heart that can help hold our pain, the scent of the wallflowers like a salve, the yellow carpet of primroses like a basket for the heart, the fresh green growth a promise of life and strength and new tomorrows, a prescription for hope.  The birds keep watch for us, and we can wait held in the web that is our life here, and that strings our heart to heaven.