The two days we need

If there is space for me here, there is space for you here

It took only one year to deal a near-fatal blow to my lifelong love of Holy Week.

Pardon the dramatics. But last year during Holy Week, I told my midwife I’d found a lump. Watched her face change when she felt it. Had a mammogram on Holy Thursday. Endured a biopsy on Good Friday. Learned I had cancer on Easter Monday.

The fury, grief, fear, and despair at finding I had cancer was only matched (and barely) by the fury, grief, fear, and despair at losing the sacred, safe space of the spiritual summit of the year.

Of course I didn’t realize how deep that wound had pierced until Holy Week started to edge on the horizon again. Of course I didn’t, because trauma works like this, to protect our overwhelmed humanity. It hides away, pushed to the farthest recesses of our minds, knowing we have to keep going and sleeping and eating and loving and working and living, so we cannot deal with it all right now. 

But whenever it finds the tiniest hole, any inkling of a release valve, trauma comes rushing back out like a blinding steam, burning whatever it touches.

So Holy Week dawned this year, and I wanted no part of it.

We went through the motions. Of course we did. Prayers and church and hymns and home, every tradition that anchors us. We piled into the car and wound our way every day to the community we love. We waved palms and washed feet and ate bread and drank wine and touched the cross and spoke the words and heard the stories and sang the songs.

Still all week long, the roiling boil of seething anger bubbled a half inch below the surface. 

I am furious to be forced to remember like this. I want this week to be about God and glory, not me and cancer. I want to banish every memory of one-year-ago—the shock and the fear, the pain and the unknown, the dread and the horror, the impossible awful of telling of everyone I loved that I had a disease that could easily kill me. I want to bury every memory deep in the ground, salt the earth above it, and never ever return.

Back when these holy days were cancer-free, this week made so much sense: God loving us in flesh and blood, God suffering for us, God redeeming what looks unredeemable. And it also made no sense in the best ways: resurrection, forgiveness, salvation, every divine inversion of human expectation. I adored this impossibly true story. Every year, I ate and drank it, I wept and walked it, I lived and breathed it. This week made the incomprehensible understandable. 

But now everything became even more bewildering. Some people wanted to make my Holy Week diagnosis the perfect part of a (decidedly!) imperfect story. It had to be like this; the timing is such a blessing. Other people shuddered that I had to walk the way of suffering during such an intense time. It’s too much for anyone to bear; it’s so unfair.

I could not handle the coincidence, so I chose a middle way, common to sufferers.

I ignored the whole damn thing.

Until the kindest woman poured warm water over my tired feet on Thursday night. In her smiling eyes I saw the love of a hundred friends and strangers from that same church who fed our family for months. 

People have been washing my feet all year, I wept to myself as she washed and dried.

Until I watched my second son walk over and pick up the end of the cross that our pastor carried on Friday, the two of them shouldering a heavy holy burden and walking it slowly around the church so everyone could reach out and touch the suffering they knew, too. 

I have met a thousand more Simons of Cyrene now, I swallowed down with a lump. 

Until Saturday morning dawned open and empty, the in-between of not-yet, and I felt suddenly back at home in a faith that gives whole days to suffering and grief.

We all need these two days, I realized, rolling over to write as the words spilled over.

Good Friday holds every pain we experience, physical or emotional or spiritual or existential. Holy Saturday makes space for grief, emptiness, the suffering of not-having and not-knowing. Personally and collectively, we need every hour of every day of Holy Week. Even when the hope and healing of resurrection feel foolish to trust, even when we find it impossible to believe that good can triumph over evil, that life will win over death.

If there is space for me here, there is space for you here. Good Friday and Holy Saturday stand like bulwarks, honoring God’s suffering and holding space for our own. Each of these feasts, this superabundance of liturgical time and theological meaning, is carved into the church’s calendar like a cornerstone. They will not crumble against the pressures of buck up and move on, get over it and look on the bright side, Sunday’s coming! Easter honors these two terrible days, letting each stand on its own. For even Easter makes no sense without them. 

All I know this year is this. Take all the time you need. Take all the space you deserve. Whether your suffering is presence or absence, external or internal, individual or communal, physical or emotional, death or loss, pain or grief, it is known by God and held by people of faith who honor these days.

Like an empty tomb, like an empty tabernacle, what makes a week holy is what it holds and what it doesn’t. We need all of the time and space we are given to make sense of what pushes beyond time and space. Transcendence and trauma and every too-much transformative truth that lies between.

This icon of the Myrrhbearers always reminds me of Good Friday meeting Holy Saturday. Death and grief, pain and loss. Two days pressed together like two faces, holograms turning in shades of sorrow and hope, depending which way you look. We cannot separate these two and still have the same story. Both of them must go to the tomb together.