Silent Saturday
On grief, waiting, and the space where nothing has settled yet.
This weekend is Easter and we move quickly past the part of the story that doesn’t settle.
We eat chocolate, hot cross buns, maybe a roast lamb dinner. We think of bunnies hiding eggs and new baby chicks. And Christians across the world, like me, are remembering and reflecting on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We know how the story goes. There are no bunnies, chicks, or eggs in it. We move from the brutality of Friday to the relief of Sunday. Death, then resurrection. Grief, then hope. It all ties up neatly in the end. Phew.
But there’s a whole day in between that we barely touch.
Saturday.
The thing is, we are reading this with over two thousand years of hindsight. We already know how it ends. We know the tomb will be empty. We know the language of victory and resurrection.
But they didn’t.
So for a moment, try to step into their reality.
The original disciples had followed Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth. Not just followed him, but built their lives on him. They believed he was the Christ, the Messiah they had been waiting for. The one who was meant to change everything.
And then he died. (The audacity!)
Not in some noble, triumphant way. He died like any other man executed by the state.
After that, there is nothing yet to suggest that anything good is coming. No empty tomb, no return, no clarity. Just a body in a grave and a group of people trying to make sense of what has just happened.
And they did not know how the story ended.
I think we forget that too easily. We so often read it backwards, with the ending already in our hands, and it softens something that was probably much more raw than we let ourselves imagine.
Because if you sit in it properly, Saturday is not peaceful or reflective in the way we like to describe it. It is confusing. It is disorientating. It is the point where everything you thought you understood no longer holds.
That is the space Silent Saturday names.
Not neat. Not where you expect things to grow. But alive, all the same.
And most of us know that place.
Not as a theological idea, but as something we have actually lived through. Times when things have not gone the way we thought they would. When something has ended and there is nothing yet to replace it. When you are left with feelings that do not resolve just because you want them to.
In my work, I see that space all the time.
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It is there in the quiet after a funeral, when everyone has gone home and the house feels wrong. It shows up weeks later, when the rest of the world has moved on and you can’t. It sits in conversations where people are trying to make sense of something that still feels unsettled.
And as a society, we’re not very good at letting people stay there.
We try to move them on. We reach for something to make it feel better. We offer words that point ahead to some kind of resolution.
Sometimes those words are true. But often they come too soon.
Because Saturday does not resolve anything. It just is what it is.
It is the point where nothing is fixed, nothing is explained, and nothing has been redeemed yet. And that is exactly the part we struggle to sit with.
If I am honest, this is the part I am still learning.
I can sit at a deathbed. I can hold a hand, have the conversations, advocate, stay steady when things are falling apart. There is something to do in those moments, even if it is quiet work.
Saturday is different.
There is nothing to do, nothing to fix, no clear next step. Just the reality that something has ended and you do not yet know what comes next.
That is not comfortable. But it is real.
So maybe the point of Silent Saturday is not to rush ahead to Sunday, even if we believe it is coming.
Maybe it is to be honest about where we are.
To stop pretending this part doesn’t exist. To resist the urge to tidy it up too quickly. Maybe it is about allowing the silence to be what it is, without forcing it to mean something before it is ready.
I think this is where most of grief lives.
So if that is where you are, there is nothing wrong with you. In fact, I think you’re in pretty good company, because this is the Saturday I find myself in, eight years after my Nana died. I actually wrote about that at the end of last year, and even then I don’t think I fully grasped what I was uncovering. I could name it. I could describe it. But I hadn’t quite sat in it.
Eight years is a long time to carry something without really looking at it.
Somewhere along the way, I had moved myself on too quickly. I had found the language that made it sound like I had come to terms with it. I had settled into a version of the story that felt manageable, something I could hold without it disrupting too much.
Looking back, I rushed myself to Sunday.
And the thing is, my Nana loved Easter. She would have been all in on it. The chocolate, the tradition of hiding the eggs in the garden, the sense of something meaningful underneath it all. It would have mattered to her, which makes it all the more uncomfortable to admit that I skipped over the part of the story that probably tells the truth most honestly.
Because grief doesn’t disappear just because we have found a way to talk about it. It doesn’t follow the timelines we quietly set for it, and it doesn’t respond to being organised into something neat. It waits. It settles somewhere just out of sight, and then, at some point, it makes itself known again.
That is what has been happening for me.
Nothing dramatic. No big moment of collapse. Just a growing awareness that something was still there, still asking for attention. A sense that I had passed over something that needed more time than I had given it.
What I skipped was Saturday.
That in-between space where nothing is resolved, where there is nothing to do except sit with what has happened and allow it to be what it is. The place that feels uncomfortable precisely because it cannot be hurried along.
So now, it feels like I am being brought back there. Not because I got it wrong, but because there is still something here that needs tending.
And maybe that is the work.
Not pushing ourselves, or anyone else, towards a version of resolution before it is ready. Not reaching too quickly for the language that makes everything sound okay. But allowing ourselves to sit in the quiet, unfinished places, and to stay there long enough for something honest to emerge.
Because you can’t skip Saturday.
It just waits for you.
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