Engaging the Silence

I am considering the reality that I should stop blogging. I think that while it may help me to write to process my life I most possibly am discouraging some one. Anyhow. I haven't decided yet (pray for me as I make this decision please) and so I will post again. :)

This year's Easter meant something new to me that I haven't experienced before. I suppose until this exact time in my life I have overlooked this part of Easter. This year's circumstances have built up something precious in my heart. And since I am not too good and expressing my feelings without rambling - here is what I mean:

"Holy Saturday is the name that is given to that 24-hour period nestled between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, between crucifixion and resurrection.

It is a day that speaks of the absence of God and is as much a part of the Christian experience as the day before and the day after. It is the moment when we experience the depth of Christ's cry on the cross, the moment when we feel abandoned by God and utterly alone in the world.  This day is never as far from us as we would wish, for there are times when we all are unsettled by the feeling that we have been abandoned and that everything we believe may be nothing more than empty words and hopeless dreams.  This is the horror of the cross, not the blood and suffering of an innocent, but the removal of God.

Holy Saturday ridicules the idea that the feeling of God's absence is reserved for those who are irreligious, for in reality it is only the religious individual who can really know this absence.  This is analogous to the experience of waiting for one whom we love in a café.  The later they are, the more we experience their absence.  Our beloved is absent to everyone in the room but we are the only one who feels it.  Who among us does not find ourselves dwelling, from time to time, or perhaps at all times, in the space of Holy Saturday?  Yet this day is rarely spoken of and the experience is often seen as one to be avoided or merely tolerated rather than embraced."

From Peter Rollin's How (Not) to Speak of God

And this from Pete Grieg's God On Mute (where he has a whole section on Holy Saturday):

"Holy Saturday seems to me to describe the place in which many of us live our lives: waiting for God to speak.

No one really talks about Holy Saturday, yet if we stop and think about it, it's where most of us live most of our lives. Holy Saturday is no-man's land between questions and answers, prayers uttered and miracles to come. It's where we wait -- with a peculiar mixture of faith and despair -- whenever God is silent or life doesn't make sense."

And on engaging the silence, he quotes Martin Luther King, that with unearned sufferings, we have a choice: "either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force."