Holy Week

This week is Holy Week in the Christian calendar. Last week I needed to do a fasting blood test and the woman who drew my blood is Muslim: she was practising Ramadan. We talked about how she had risen at five to get caffeine into her system, how fasting is challenging. Through Lent this year, my husband and I have given up meat other than on Sundays. It has been an excellent discipline but not as hard as fasting from caffeine or from eating and drinking during daylight hours.

Lent is part of my practice and I need to tell you a secret: my book Renaissance is a Lenten book. I once wrote a Christmas-themed book (Seeker of Stars) and this one is a book that travels through the challenging days of Lent, the season when we give up things that aren’t bad for us but might have a hold on us. It isn’t stated explicitly in the book – although early on the main character does see people wearing ashen crosses on their foreheads and stays in Italy for fifty days.

What is clear is that the main character flies home on my favourite day of the year, Holy Saturday. It’s my favourite day in the same way that Thursday is my favourite day of the week and March is my favourite month: it’s the moment when everything good is ahead. But it is also a vulnerable moment, a moment when we have been through the depths of Good Friday and when we don’t always know that Easter Sunday is coming. That’s why the physics concept of Schrodingers Cat makes it into the book too – the thought experiment that says two things can be true simultaneously until the situation is observed. We poise on the equinox, the days and nights of equal length. At the winter solstice, people traditionally gathered around their desire that the sun would not continue to disappear. The equinox, tied into Passover and Easter, is that moment when we believe the minor chords will resolve into major but we just aren’t certain.

(This morning in church – Palm Sunday – I had the opposite experience. Palm Sunday begins with what looks like the start of the happy ending – that the man on the donkey is being recognized for his true identity, being proclaimed king. We were given palm branches to wave and wave I did, joyfully after several palmless Covid years. Then we were asked to put our palm branches on the altar, and something shifted – not a continuous move toward the light and the happy ending but a shadow that said we don’t just get to celebrate. We have to go through Good Friday and the cross first. Then, the service concluded with the singing of hosannas I’ve only ever heard as a jubilant hymn, reset to a familiar Good Friday tune of lament. The juxtaposition took my breath away: here we go.)

I once attended a Good Friday service that attempted to imagine the disciples on Holy Saturday, clever people who didn’t resemble the bumblers and betrayers of the Bible accounts and who instead said things like, “Hey, remember when Jesus said x. I wonder whether maybe he meant that he will come back to life.” That’s not Holy Saturday, not as I understand it.

Holy Saturday is the longing for light and life and for death not to be the final word, mingled with the fear that it might be. It’s Princess Kate’s cancer diagnosis. It’s the child in the hospital, the marriage on the rocks, the being passed over for a job, the heavy snow on the first day of spring. In my book, it’s the flight home where the main character does not know what will lie ahead.

This week I will be traveling. Though I have gone on the Lenten journey and though I have gorgeous plans for Easter Sunday in California’s sequoias, my Good Friday and my Holy Saturday will be messed up. I cringe as I admit to you that there is a possibility that at the moment when the church recalls Jesus saying “It is finished,” I may well be on a Hollywood Tour of the Stars open-air bus. What I want to say about that is to echo Walt Whitman’s words: I contain multitudes. (That doesn’t make it better, does it?) But Holy Saturday contains multitudes too, or at least paradoxes: hope/despair, light/darkness, heads/tails, alive/dead.

This week I invite you to read Renaissance in this light but even more than that, I invite you to sit in the paradoxes of your life and the world. As Christine Valters Painter writes in her Holy Week blessing (from a forthcoming book of blessings due to be published in spring 2026):

Travel with us into 
the border spaces of unknowing
holding death and life, 
the liminal realm of in-between…
Bring us into communion 
with all those who suffer
from poverty, hunger, war, abuse,
climate crisis, pollution, clearcutting, 
the whole of creation groaning
together in labor, 
birthing a new possibility,
one only dimly seen
in quiet moments, 
a glimmer in the eyes
a song in the throat.