The Lingering Quietude of Holy Saturday

 

It is daylight, now, yet the sounds are more muted than a typical Saturday morning; bird song being the primary echoes of last night’s singing.  

 

Throughout the preceding days in this small, ancient Italian hillside village, workers had hung the large paintings – perhaps 8-feet by 4-feet - throughout the narrow streets of the town in preparation for Good Friday’s “Way of the Cross” procession.  Each painting depicted one of the traditional stations of the cross – one, imaging the Roman guards rolling dice for Jesus’ tunic, hung immediately across from our doorway.  

 

We had no idea what to expect.  At the appointed hour – just before 9 pm and well-after dark – townsfolk, perhaps 200 strong, gathered in front of one of the ancient churches, and, following the large cross and accompanying signs of the faith held aloft on poles by strong and fervent assignees, sang our way from station to station.  At each painting, now dimly illuminated by two burning candles on the pavement below, we paused for a reading from scripture, and a prayer from the priest, before resuming our song and our inexorable procession through the cramped lanes forward to the next artfully rendered scene and eventually to the miserable end.  There, after closing priestly words, we were bade to depart in silence – an admonition even we could translate, and with which everyone complied.  

 

Back through the now emptied streets we made our way back toward our apartment, pausing briefly as we passed the now lonely candles still flickering beneath the art.  In silence, and in darkness of more kinds than one, with only those small, flickering flames licking away the void, walked a more utilitarian procession of our own.

 

We are not Catholics, nor do we speak Italian, but we are no strangers to the story.  The images themselves were raconteurs enough.  The readings of the volunteers, the prayers of the priest, the guitar strums by the teenager leading the songs eventually devolved into the accompanying drone over which our own prayers and meditations were hummed. 

 

For as I say, we know the story.

 

There was rain overnight, no doubt extinguishing whatever candles might have remained burning; washing away  – at least literally if not essentially – some of the soot and smudge of the world.  The deeper cleaning needed requires sturdier, more spiritual bristles and water of a different character.  We will be reminded of those tomorrow.

 

But today, amidst the fragrant morning and the industrious joy of the singing birds, the memory of the darkness lingers – the crowd, the murmured responses, the foot treads, the images, the flickering flames.  A day – a mood – perhaps not unlike that one endured by Mary and Martha and Peter and John and all those others who had heard what they could not unhear, seen what they could not unsee.

 

Remembering, seeing, hearing afresh, wandering these same narrow streets now haunted by the echo of grace.