If there ever is a Sunday

Of the three days that culminate this week, I think Holy Saturday is commonly glossed over. After all, it’s the day when not much happens; it has none of the acute drama of Good Friday and we aren’t yet at the chocolatey celebration of Easter Sunday.

But I feel like out of the three, it’s actually the one that should most resonate with the here and now. It’s the most liminal, the most unsettled; beneath the hush is a deep, lurching, depressed anxiety.

The Disciples sleepwalk in despairing terror through that liminal day. They’ve lost everything that mattered to them. It was all for nothing. It was all a lie. Maybe they’ll be arrested and executed too. Maybe they’ll somehow escape the notice of the authorities, but what then? What’s left? Simon Peter in particular has denied even knowing his best friend not once but three times, and the guilt and shame is crushing.

Everything that could go wrong has done so. Everything seems hopeless. There is no empirical reason to keep faith in a better tomorrow. To do so feels like the height of delusion.

We spend most of our time in some version of that day, I believe. Of the three days, it’s the one most of us probably know the best.

I never really thought about it in those terms until a few years back when I read Fred Clark’s (The Slacktivist) piece on it. That piece changed everything for me in some subtle but significant respects, and every year since then I read it again. I’m going to link to it obviously, but also I’m going to repost a section—the part that hits me the hardest. Because, again, I recognize it. And I recognize the conclusion it leads me to.

How do we navigate faith in a better world when that faith seems like evidence-free foolishness?

Discussing matters of faith with my friend Alexandra Erin, I once heard her describe herself as a sort of “Puddleglum Christian”. I feel like I’d place myself there as well, for the most part. It refers specifically to a passage from C.S. Lewis’s book The Silver Chair, when the character Puddleglum denies the will-breaking enchantment of a witch:

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

I want to live as a Narnian even if there isn’t any Narnia—and I don’t know that there is. I can’t prove any of it. It certainly seems unlikely. But I want to try to do that.

(It’s no accident that I often think of my Christian Druidry as “Christianity for Narnians”.)

One of my favorite poems of all time is Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front”. Every line is quotable, and I come back over and over to all of them at various times, but there’s one that I frequently come back to more than many others:

Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

The facts at hand do not, in general, inspire joy.

And then there’s my girl Julian of Norwich’s best-known line: All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Which she wrote in the midst of the Black Death.

It would be easy to dismiss these things as—like I said—foolishness, wishful thinking, or even spiritual bypass. But I don’t think it is any of those, or at least I think that if someone gets that out of them, it’s the wrong takeaway. All of these writers knew and know pain and fear. None of them ever denied it. The point isn’t to deny or shortcut through any of it, what Julian calls the via negativa. The point is to exist within it, to see it clearly and honestly, and then to choose how one wants to live in response to it.

That’s not an easy choice and it’s not a one-and-done. We make that choice every day.

I think so much of life actually involves living in a carefully and mindfully selected as if, although one has considered all the facts. So Fred says, and so I believe.

There are some things we can know on this Saturday. Jesus is dead, to begin with, dead and buried. He said the world was upside-down and needed a revolution to turn it right-way-round and so he was executed for disturbing the peace. He came and said love was greater than power, and so power killed him.

And now it’s Saturday and Jesus is dead and we’re all going to die and everything I’ve told you about him turns out to be in vain and everything I’ve staked my life on turns out to be in vain. Our faith is futile and we’re still hopeless in our sins. Jesus is dead and we are of all people most to be pitied.

That last paragraph is a paraphrase from St. Paul. What he actually says there, in his letter to the Christians in Corinth, is “if …” What he says, specifically, is:

If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. … If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead …

But that’s Sunday language and Sunday certainty and it doesn’t make much sense here on Saturday. Here on Saturday, we can hope it’s true and we may even try to believe it’s true, but we can’t know “in fact” one way or another. Not now. Not on Saturday.

And to be honest, it doesn’t seem terribly likely, because Saturday, this Saturday, is all we’ve ever known. Yesterday was this same Saturday, and so was the day before that, and the day before that, and the day before that.

Why should we expect that tomorrow will be any different?

Seriously, just look around. Does it look like the meek are inheriting the earth? Does it look like those who hunger and thirst for justice are being filled? Does it look like the merciful are being shown mercy?

Jesus was meek and merciful and hungry for justice and look where that got him. They killed him. We killed him. Power won.

That’s what this everyday Saturday shows us — power always wins. “If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote, “imagine a boot stomping on a human face — forever.”

“But in fact,” St. Paul says, everything changes on Sunday. Come Sunday power loses. Come Sunday, love wins, the meek shall inherit, the merciful will receive mercy and no one will ever go hungry for justice again. Come Sunday, everything changes.

If there ever is a Sunday.

And but so, this is why we hope for Sunday and why we live for the hope of Sunday. Even though we can’t know for sure that Sunday will ever come and even if Saturday is all we ever get to see.