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Good morning. Today is Easter Saturday. It's often overlooked- it's the in-between day, no church services, no special meal, maybe just time to catch up on DIY. But I'm always struck by how profound this particular Saturday is, how it sums up a tension at the heart of human life. The literary critic George Steiner uses the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday as a metaphor for the psychological experience of atheist and believer alike. He says
. . ours is the long journey of the Saturday, between suffering, aloneness, unutterable waste, on the one hand and the dream of liberation, or rebirth, on the other.
Steiner believes that human lives are Saturday lives - that we must exist in the in-between spaces, the tightrope walk between hope and despair. Looking at the news this week, it isn't hard to find tragedy. The bleakness of Good Friday seemed especially bleak this year, with the groans and cries of people across the world echoing in our ears. It's not just terrorist attacks and plane crashes that can tempt us to despair - it's also the ordinary miseries and small heartbreaks that never make the news.
These Friday things are inescapable. The temptation to throw up our hands and kill our hopes for more is strong. Some advise this - at least if you expect nothing you can't be disappointed. Perhaps it's the expectation that's the problem- if we can let that go perhaps we will find peace.
The problem is that hope is persistent. We wait and we look and we long, and far off in the distance, if we squint, we think we can see Sunday coming. Many of us have a hunch that whatever it may look like, the story of history is not, after all, a tragedy.
It's tiring, this holding both hope and despair in our heads. It is like walking a tightrope. There's a longing to be able to fall off in one direction or another, to say, well, the real truth about life is it's a misery to be endured, or the real truth is that everything’s all right, really. But we can't.
In the Christian tradition, learning to live with this tension is central. Most bad theology is an attempt to close the tension down. Easter Friday is real. At least part of the truth about humans, Christians believe, is that when we encounter goodness, truth and beauty, especially when embodied in a man, we cry "crucify him". But Easter Sunday is also true, when this goodness is shown to be more enduring, more forgiving, more fundamental than we ever dared hope.
And so I'm trying to learn to live well in this Saturday, waiting, walking that tightrope, balanced between the two.
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