The Ambience of Love: Keeping the Silence of Holy Saturday

The Ambience of Love: Keeping the Silence of Holy Saturday
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Jacob J. Erickson

In the midst of the orchestral movements of Easter Week, Holy Saturday is a strange time for Christians who hold it: a time and space of silence, of confusion, between crucifixion and resurrection. There is a distinct feel of liturgical dizziness and aimlessness. One is haunted by the dirges of Golgotha, but cannot sing with the glory of Easter. We live in that between space of life mingled with death, grief mingled with love, tears mingled with hope. Our mouth is parched, we try to look ahead, but no sound will come.

A dear friend once described her life as “living in Holy Saturday” to me, somehow dwelling in that space of having to continuously relearn life and community in the wake of sadness. On the days that we’re being fully honest with ourselves, I suspect, many of us live in that space, quite often in an ordinary manner throughout our lives. Holy Saturday becomes a way of naming ordinary life, especially in the immediacy of grief. A theology of the quotidian emerges here, a deep listening to our lives, and yet an uncertainty of how to navigate the deep silence that responds to our fragile hopes.

Silence is also difficult for our contemporary minds. In an age of redemption narratives and hero movies, loud religions and atheisms and even louder politicians, we may feel forced into silence and yet so desperately want to claim our own voice. We may be so used to the noise of social media and continuous news and the anxiety of our minds, that silence feels impossible at most or so desperately uncomfortable at least. When our “moral flesh keeps silence,” to paraphrase the old hymn, we begin to shift in our chairs, wake up in the middle of the night, or fill our minds with fear and dread.

In recent years, I am thinking differently about the silence of Holy Saturday. Or, at least, I began to think differently about divine silence.

I once stumbled into a performance of the American composer John Cage’s piece 4’33”. Cage’s (1912 - 1992) music is an experiment in indeterminacy, in the oddities of sound and noise. For instance, he once wrote a piece to be performed by five radios. Some folks contest whether is music actually is at all (I desperately believe his work is music of the most profound).

Cage is best known for his 1952 piece 4’33”, I think, because of the strange experience and expectation of what happens during its performance. The musician enters the room, and the piece is announced. The musician sits down at the piano, as if they’re about to play and then, well, doesn’t. The musician sits playfully still. If you were to look at the score for the piece, the instruction to the musician is that they remain Tacet, unplaying during the movement—unplaying for four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

Needless to say, especially for those who don’t know the piece, the room’s response varies. Some people laugh uncomfortably, some people shift nervously in their seats. Children squirm and talk. You can feel the delight and discomfort and pure anxiety of the room. Thunderous applause often breaks out in relief when the piece concludes.

That, however is the point. The absence of playing the instrument lures forth the performances of those in their seat. Sounds of laughter and discomfort fill the measures. One hears the hum of the room, the lights, the passing cars, the coughs, the shifting bodies, the beating wind against a window, and the feelings of the space. The room becomes an orchestra of the unexpected.

Cage constructed a piece where the ambient sounds of relation become the music. The room isn’t fully silent, and the performance can change drastically depending on who is present, the weather, or life circumstances. Subversively, the silence is the gorgeous and disorienting music of everyday experience. The experience compels those present to listen to their surroundings, to hear their present and space in different terms.

I think to sit in the unexpected silence of Holy Saturday does something similar—the time and space asks us to listen to the ambience of our spirits together as we grieve and celebrate life and death mingled together. Holy Saturday produces a spiritual ambience of political empathy that asks us to be present and listen to the crying of our hearts in grief or injustice, the crying of our hearts in silent joy and fragile hope.

There may be a shadow of that ambient empathy in the mythology of Holy Saturday. Indeed, the classical icons that depict that time quite often display an event called the “Harrowing of Hell,” where Christ is breaking down the doors of hell, liberating those held captive by past demons, and breaking down the very gates that make hell an inescapable prison, life emerging in the very midst of the deepest terrors of death. The story isn’t in biblical texts at all, but the theological innovation is interesting and might say something. In the silence of death, somehow, one hears other impossible possibilities. I don’t read the icon or myth as a redemption story, per se, but as the power of love standing in the midst of death.

The contemporary theologian Shelly Rambo’s writing provokes new interest in the theology of Holy Saturday. In Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, Rambo argues that theology needs to move beyond the paradigm of sharp divisions of “life and death” in order to take human experience and trauma seriously in all of its messiness. Thinking-with 20th century theologians Hans urs Von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr, Rambo argues for a “middle space” and a “middle Spirit” that witnesses to the intermingling of life and death, the traces of death in life, and life emerging from death. She argues for a theology of “remaining,” of asking what remains in the ongoing wake of such experience, of creative love that remains in the midst of such things. And I think Cage’s invitation to hear what music plays, the performance of ambient sound as complex music, does something similar. We are lured to remain and witness to potential love and creativity.

Holy Saturday lures us to ask where we are, exactly, in the midst of all of this mix of life and death and death haunting life and life emergent in death. The ambience asks us to hear the cry of our neighbor, of the chaos and creation of the planet. This invitation to an orchestra of ongoing creation asks us to lean into the subtle breeze that reaches our cheek, to mourn our losses, to celebrate the life of baby starlings on our porches, to grieve family together in community, to herald the surprising flowers of spring, to witness in face of violence of all kinds, to gaze in wonder at the silent stars or mornings we’ve neglected to see. We are invited to listen and discern the more subtle sounds of life and death drowned out by distraction. We are invited to remind each other that an ambient love might remain—or could still remain—even in the midst.

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