In and Out of the Valley
AM Psalm 95 for the Invitatory, 88 • PM Psalm 27
Lam. 3:37-58 • Heb. 4:1-16[AM] • Rom. 8:1-11[PM]
In a sense it has been Saturday for nearly two thousand years. At the first Holy Saturday, the disciples had suffered the spirit-crushing events of Good Friday. In the three statements we recite during the eucharistic prayer
Christ has died.
Christ has risen.
Christ will come again.
they were living that day between the first and the second. They surely had sunk steeply into a valley of despair. The readings today from Lamentations express something like what they surely felt. Guilt, terror, “ruin and destruction.” Tears stream down cheeks. Bottomless grief. Fear of being “hunted…like a bird” by those determined to throw them into a pit. Lamentations, indeed.
We know what will come the next morning—“Christ has risen”—and we know how the disciples came out of their closeted room utterly changed. We know how they themselves arose, in their case out of that awful time of being lost in the valley. Then Christ leaves them again, promising to return. That leaves us between the second and third part of the “mystery of faith.”
We are left, that is, in our own Holy Saturday. Speaking only for myself, obviously, for all the faith I can muster there is still plenty of doubt that can run pretty deep, bound up in the pain that sometimes can seem just about everywhere. It can feel like a descent into a hard place.
I am writing this reflection after spending a long (and very warm) day in Death Valley National Park. The park has its beauty—extraordinary vistas, beautiful canyons, the earth’s structure laid utterly bare—but it also can be the epitome of desolation. It is the lowest and driest place in the nation and, by some authorities, the hottest place on earth. It earned its name honestly after a literally misguided party of forty-niners wandered into it and left one of their number there in a grave.
The passage from Lamentations took on a vividness as I walked around Badwater Basin, an unforgiving salt flat, 282 ft below sea level (and 98 degrees on April 1), that might be an embodiment of a sink of despair. Few of us will experience anything that remotely approaches that metaphorical desolation—certainly I have not—but all of us will walk through our valleys of despond, and I suspect all of us, like the disciples, will have our times of doubt as we live through our two thousand year Saturday.
At Saturday’s end, the literal one, not the metaphorical, whether this evening or in the morning, we will gather to celebrate the joy felt by the disciples as they moved from the first to the second of the “mysteries of faith” and will affirm our faith that, as at the end of the passage from Lamentations, God has come near, has redeemed us, and assures us: “Do not fear.”
Written by Elliott West
Elliott is emeritus professor of history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than thirty years. He thought through this reflection while driving across Nevada’s Area 51. No space aliens. In fact, pretty much not anything at all.