Christ of the mysteries, I trust You
to be stronger than each storm within me.
I will trust in the darkness and know
that my times, even now, are in Your hand.
Tune my spirit to the music of heaven,
and somehow, make my obedience count for You.
– The Prayer of St. Brendan
We’ve been hovering between Good Friday and Holy Saturday for months now. Living in tension and paradox—yearning for Easter or maybe just an ending to our pandemic way of life.
Prayer is born here where contradictions have become the air we breathe—so natural to us now that we have ceased to recognize the storms that sap our energies. The body holds these incongruities–unnamed wounds and desires that we have long since surrendered.
Like sitting vigil with the dying we seem to be on the edge of collapse. Instead of looking for Resurrection we wait for death.
This, my beloved, is the posture of Holy Saturday. To presume we know that Easter will come belies its wonder. Do not enter that empty tomb before time. Sit awhile with your own mortality. “Trust in the darkness” of this day—
God is tuning our spirits, sinews and bones to respond like the sympathetic tuning of strings to one another–each one and all of us together.
So we can discern, at the edge of hearing—when a whisper of the ‘music of heaven’, our Easter song, has begun.
– Debra Donnelly-Barton