I’ve copied this from CAC – Richard Rohr’s daily email meditations

Each week they send a summary of the week’s meditations and a contemplative practice. I’ve found the practices very meaningful and this week’s was especially so considering we’re in the liminality of Saturday between Jesus death and resurrection.

Practice: Darkness of the Tomb

Anyone who enters into love, and through love experiences inextricable suffering and the fatality of death, enters into the history of the human God, for [their] forsakenness is lifted away from [them] in the forsakenness of Christ, and in this way [they] can continue to love, need not look away from the negative and from death, but can sustain death. —Jurgen Moltmann [1]

As I shared earlier this week, Jesus replaced the myth of redemptive violence with the truth of redemptive suffering. On the cross he showed us how to hold pain and let it transform us rather than project it elsewhere. I believe one of the greatest meanings of the crucifixion is the revelation of God’s presence in the midst of suffering. God suffers with us.

Even when we may feel alone and abandoned, as Jesus did on the cross—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)—we can trust that divine love is holding us. Thankfully, we know the end of the story from the beginning, that after death comes resurrection, after injustice comes liberation, after wounding comes healing. But we can’t skip over the darkness of the tomb.

On this Holy Saturday, before the joy of Easter morning, befriend and be close to sorrow, whether your own suffering, that of a loved one, or the pain of creation. In this liminal space of waiting and the unknown, as poet David Whyte writes, let “the night put its arm around” you.

Last night they came with news of death,
not knowing what I would say.  

I wanted to say,
“The green wind is running through the fields,
making the grass lie flat.”

I wanted to say,
“The apple blossom flakes like ash,
covering the orchard wall.”

I wanted to say,
“The fish floats belly up in the slow stream,
stepping stones to the dead.”

They asked if I would sleep that night,
I said I did not know.

For this loss I could not speak,
the tongue lay idle in a great darkness,
the heart was strangely open,
the moon had gone,
and it was then
when I said, “He is no longer here,”
that the night put its arm around me
and all the white stars turned bitter with grief. [2]

[1] Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Harper & Row: 1974), 254.

[2] David Whyte, “News of Death,” River Flow (Many Rivers Press: 2007), 313. Used with permission.

Image credit: Lamentation of Christ (detail), Andrea Mantegna, 1470-1474, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy.