Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 76

I grew up in a church that did not recognize Christmas and Easter as special religious days. Every Easter we heard a paragraph at the beginning of the sermon if not an entire sermon on “Why We Do Not Keep Easter.”

As an adult, I have come to appreciate some of the pageantry and symbolism of Holy Week. My favorite day is the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter.

Some early Christians believed that on “Holy Saturday” Jesus went throughout the hadean realm and announced to all souls residing there, beginning with Abel, the good news of what God was getting ready to do on Easter.

My personal reason for appreciating Saturday is far less esoteric—I can identify more readily and more often with the disciples of Jesus on that day than I can on the Friday before or the Sunday after.

On Friday the disciples were totally disillusioned and dejected, their leader having died a shameful death. I have known very few times of despair in my life. I am fortunate every year to have only a few situational depressions that last a couple of days at most. Some people I know live much of their lives in a deep, dark, Good-Friday funk of depression.

On Sunday, by contrast, the disciples were euphoric, ecstatic—running and jumping and shouting for joy. I am grateful to have about a dozen of those as-good-as-it-gets resurrection days every year, days on which I yell “Yippee!” or croon a few bars of “What a Wonderful World.”

But the other 350 days of my year are more like Saturday of Holy Week. I plod along, old griefs and losses still percolating on the back burner of my memory. But also in the mix is hope for one more mountaintop experience, one more new beginning, one more Easter morning. I believe that yearning will carry me all the way home.