April 3, 2021: Holy Saturday

 

The Hermit’s Holy Saturday

Silence hangs on the earth. The moon has risen

Above the ridge and shoved the clouds aside.

Yesterday’s rain has gone. Tonight’s turned frigid

Again, as if the winter were a prison,

Spring a failed escape. Send me a vision,

The hermit prays. Send something. I’m afraid

Of all this nothing. He sits and tries to read: 

Something strange is happening. His windows glisten

With frost and firelight—this, he thinks, is strange,

Given the time, when life and death contend.

The outcome isn’t clear, at such close range.

He knows, but un-remembers. Here at the end

Of penance, he stirs the embers. Can he change

His life? The fire wanes and will not mend.

 

                                    by Sally Thomas

                                    Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry (2020) 

So often when those who live in northern or even moderate climates prepare spiritually for Christ’s rising from the dead, nature fails to provide the proper analog, frigid weather contending with very weak signs of the coming of spring.  The first buds might poke through the soil only to be killed by the return of frost.

Finding nature uninspiring, we might seek a direct sign from God, “Send me a vision . . . send something” so that Christ’s resurrection and, by extension, my own might be believable.   I am supposed to have spent all of Lent preparing for abundance, renewal, but “I’m afraid”—either that it was all for “nothing” or that I can really do “nothing” to experience the fruits of God’s sacrifice and redemption.  “Here at the end of penance,” is it even possible for me to “change” enough?  I “know” Lent is supposed to “change” me?  But I am in a state of “un-remembering” when I ask, “can” I change?

The real “death” of my soul would be not to remember, not to believe, in its possibilities—for change, renewal and growth.

 

                                    Dr. Mary Ann B. Miller

                                    Department of English, Caldwell University