How desolate lies the city

 Here begins the lamentation of the prophet Jeremiah.
 How desolate lies the city that was once full of people:
the queen of nations has become as a widow;
the ruler of provinces is now subject to others.
By night she weeps in sorrow and tears run down her cheeks. —First Lamentation for Holy Thursday


From a reflection given at Morning Prayer on Holy Saturday three years ago:

I will admit to a guilty sense of relief when the Liturgy ends and we all go home - where I am confronted with the laundry and a messy kitchen and not with Christ on the cross. Poet T.S. Eliot recognized what underlies my ambivalence, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.”...

It’s a harrowing grace I seek on this day, to sit with the knowledge that Jesus has died, but not yet risen...
Psalm 69 offers a us a poignant yet powerful image of such an experience:

 I have entered the watery depths,
and the current has swept me away.
I am exhausted with my calling out.
My throat is hoarse.
My eyes fail from hoping for my God. 

 Holy Saturday is an invitation for us enter those depths, to let the current sweep us away, until we know what it is like to call for God until we are exhausted, to seek him until our eyes fail. Until we grasp what we proclaim at each celebration of the Eucharistic, until we comprehend what the first disciples did: Christ has died. For this one day, let us bear what reality we can.