This is not the weather for which one might hope -- Easter comes early this year, and it would have been foolish to count on sun and warmth. These things happen, of course; next year, Easter will be even earlier, March 23rd, just about as early as it can get. We may not get another nice warm one until 2011, when Easter will fall on April 24th. Watch it rain.
With these and sourer thoughts, Holy Saturday begins. In the absence of a liturgical marker for the day, as opposed to the festival tonight, there is only feverish activity on the part of the altar guild to ready the church for the vigil, and more feverish activity in the office as the priest fiddles with the sermon and readies the baptismal register, suspecting that everyone else in the clericus probably had all this stuff done a week ago last Wednesday. There has been more than the usual amount of preaching of late, and it is difficult to find something else that needs saying.
Perhaps at least part of this day belongs elsewhere. Perhaps it is a day for home, a day to get out of the office as quickly as you can, to finish up the altar and get yourself home. Perhaps the last sermon of your preaching marathon is about as good as it's going to get. Perhaps it is a day to play some beautiful music and think a bit, as you go about mindless homely tasks, allowing the highly charged beauty of Thursday and the starkness of Friday to settle into your spirit, a day to remember with charity toward yourself how life, thought and reflex all slow when one is bereaved, and to give yourself a break.
Tomorrow you will dress a bit better than usual, perhaps, under your cassock. Perhaps you bought something new to wear tomorrow, if you are a layperson, something bright and springlike. Tomorrow might not be the day for it. They say it might snow.
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