Lenten Reflections

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By Fr. Jerome Day, O.S.B., Professor of English

The campus of Saint Anselm College, usually so alive with students and professors bustling to get to class, with athletes rushing to work out and practice, with the great tower bells of Alumni Hall sounding the hours and announcing Mass and with traffic and pedestrians dancing between each other, is unusually quiet today – every year. The student, faculty and staff are on the Easter break, gym is empty, the bells are stilled, the traffic and street-crossers vanished. What has happened?

The monastic community at Saint Anselm, along with a number of guests here for the celebration of Holy Week, joins with the Church throughout the world … in silence. This is the day after the solemn commemoration of the death of the Lord Jesus on the Cross of Calvary. His body has been taken down from the Cross, placed on the knees of the Blessed Virgin Mary, his Holy Mother, and then finally placed in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea now given over to Christ. Holy Saturday is a day of deep silence, a day when, symbolically, nothing happens.

Although the Liturgy of the Hours proceeds and meals, with the work they entail, continue, the silence, the cessation of activity is obvious, palpable and thought-inducing. We live in an age when noise of every kind seems necessary to our well-being. It isn’t, of course, and often it can be corrosive. The silence of Holy Saturday and the minimal activities are meant to be sobering, reflective and healing. With the Church, we gather at the tomb of the Lord, whose body was once anointed by the Holy Women before the stone was rolled across the entrance. The tender Child of Bethlehem who grew into a young man, a carpenter like Joseph, his guardian, in Nazareth, has passed from us. The wandering preacher of God’s love, the miracle-worker who welcomed sinners, is no more. Jesus is dead. We wait at the tomb in prayer, reflecting on who this Jesus is, what he has done for us and who he summons us to become. We wait in silence and in expectation.

Unlike those who placed the body of the Lord in the tomb, we have the grace of the Holy Spirit and the perspective of 2,000 years of Christian life. We know in whom we have believed! And yet, this day of silence and stillness is necessary. The human life of Jesus was ended on the Cross. Like so many we have loved, Jesus too was placed in a tomb. As will we. But we were also baptized into his death so that we might rise with him to new and eternal life.

Because the divine life of Jesus can never end, Holy Saturday is also day when, as the Creed at Sunday Mass tells us, he descended into the land of the dead. Icons and poetry, East and West, speak of this moment when the Living Christ, the Word made Flesh, brings news of his impending Resurrection into the very depths of being. This “harrowing of Hell” brings hope of Resurrection to all – from Adam and Eve to the patriarchs and prophets to Joseph asking about his beloved Mary, even to John the Baptist, whose blood is still fresh.

But this day, we are still. We grieve the consequence of sin, our sin. And we pray in silence. And in hope.