UNDER THE PREPARATION, SILENCE. WOMEN.

Holy Saturday is a deeply strange day. In my youth, as a Dutch liberal Protestant, it wasn’t anything much: just the day between Bach’s St Matthew Passion on Good Friday and the sunny festivity of Easter morning, with painted eggs on the breakfast table, flowers everywhere, and church at 10 or 11. So Saturday was mainly the day you prepared Sunday.

The first time  I saw something different was in Toronto, where I had discovered the marvellously medieval Church of St Mary Magdalene, with its bare almost undecorated interior, its two superb choirs (it had been Healey Willan’s church), and its punctilious and quite beautiful liturgy, full of incense and austere plainchant.

They, I found, had something called an “Easter Vigil”. All news to me. So one year I went, and was astonished. What took my breath away was coming into the church on Saturday and finding, first of all, that ordinary parishioners had been kneeling and praying there uninterruptedly since the day before; and then all the statues veiled in purple and (the real shock) on the altar the Tabernacle, open and empty. Never had (or have) I felt so piercingly the sense of abandonment that the first followers must have felt on the day after the Crucifixion.

So Holy Saturday is a time of thinking about that, I find. Of course it’s also the preparations for Easter, cleaning the house, hiding the eggs for the children, ironing that new dress, etc. – a creeping joy. But at the same time that weird sense of emptiness, and thinking back to the way it must have been for them.

Was it a shock? Well, for the ones closest to Jesus it wasn’t as if they hadn’t been told what was going to happen. But that’s the way life works: you are told what’s going to happen, yet you can’t truly believe it and go on as if. (Look at climate change.) And then it happens. So what did they do? First, they took off. Two, we know, came back: Peter until the cock crowed, John to be there to the end, with Mary and the other women. The others we don’t hear of till well afterwards. Joseph of Arimathea was there, and took care of the burial, decent man. John took care of Mother Mary. But on the Saturday, the only people still there, sitting by the tomb, were women. Mary of Magdala, and Mary of Bethany, Lazarus’ sister.

What were their thoughts? Did they remember that He had spoken of resurrection? And if so, were they the only ones who did? All the same, they must have wondered. The death had been so awful: the He could die at all, first; that He had to die in the most beastly and humiliating manner; that He had suffered so excruciatingly; that He – He, the Meshiach! – had cried out that heart-rending opening of Psalm 22; that He had been laid to rest, an emaciated corpse, sadly shrouded in a freshly-hewn tomb; and then? Nothing. The Nothing of silence, while the world continued on its metalled ways of appetency.

It was always the women who laid out the dead, and mostly the women who did the mourning. And on Holy Saturday, it’s the women I think of: the women who, with John, were the closest human beings to Jesus the man. Three women called Miriam, or Mary. The one who had been there at that wedding and told the servants to do what He would tell them, to whom He had upon occasion been extremely rude, and who had had to watch her child die; the one who had attached herself to him as a follower and whose legendary past and voluptuous tresses we may or may not believe in; and that quiet listener, that silent intense friend who taken on board everything He had to say and may have been one of the very few who actually understood.

As we get ready the eggs, the flowers, the tablecloths, the leg of lamb or whatever takes its place; as we dress the house and ourselves; whether or not we go to an Easter Vigil tonight, with its silent meditation and then its sudden flame, its bright lights and its glorious music; let us keep in mind the emptiness of the Tabernacle, and the women. Just for today.

I owe the image of the two Marys to Mr T.V. Anthony Raj, aka Tvaraj, a photographer and a devout and curious layman who is my age and has a fine Gospel blog. The women remind me of Leonardo.