Holy Saturday is about holy silence.
In such silence, we do not move quickly or seek to assign clarity.
We do not rush toward the next day or pretend disappointment has not occurred. Holy silence is the long exhale between “It is finished” and “He is risen.“
The land of silence.
In Into the Silent Land, Martin Laird speaks of silence not as emptiness, but as a particular kind of presence—a presence that dwells beneath the noise of our thoughts, our griefs, our compulsions. Silence, for Laird, is not something we create—it is the very ground of our being, always there, waiting. It is Presence.
(Note: Laird’s book is the best I have ever read on the topic of Christian contemplative prayer.)
Holy Saturday invites us into that Land of Silence.
It calls us to release our grip on controlling outcomes, to cease our striving to fix or explain, and to simply be. Not as resignation, but as radical trust.
It is the spiritual posture of rest without certainty.
There is no spectacle on Holy Saturday.
No miracles.
No immediate answers.
No desperate prayers to change the reality of things.
Only grief.
Sadness.
Silence.
And this way provides us with a practice of prayer—
a kind of prayer that changes the pray-er.
With practice, as Laird writes, “The mind gradually becomes a more faithful servant of silence, rather than its saboteur.” This is an invitation to let silence become our teacher—not to conquer it or interpret it, but to consent to it. To wait with it. To dwell in it.
Silence as prayer—the way of Holy Saturday—is a practice we must learn,
for most of us are not naturally prone to such a way. And it is a practice that, I suspect, is particularly important in our current day.
Silence is not absence.
It is presence beyond words.
It is trust in its most radical form.
Silence reminds us:
Something is happening, even when we cannot see.
A greater Reality is unfolding beneath us, always.
So we wait.
Not passively, but attentively.
Not despairing, but fully feeling.
Not alone, but with Presence.
Shane Ash 