Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday - Reflection .png

Today’s Paschal Triduum reflection is from Fr. Dennis Gallagher A.A.,
Provincial Superior of the Assumptionists in North America

The liturgy of our Easter Vigil begins in the darkness of night, especially appropriate in the context of our pandemic year. There is actually something consoling about the darkness. God is telling us that He is fully aware of the night which is around us and within us, and that He has already struck his light at the heart of it.

This is the light that enables us to see, shows us the way, gives us direction. For those who give themselves to it, the Easter mystery means opening up pathways of hope for ourselves and our world. Those pathways always take the form of an Exodus, a passage from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom. From exile to homecoming, from death to life. The true pathway of hope is to follow along the path of Christ.

The story of our salvation, reviewed and brought to life in tonight’s readings, does not lead us in the direction of escaping the limits, the frustrations and the sufferings of this life, much less to rid ourselves of them by the instruments of our own power. It is a story, after all, of painful renunciation, of exile, and the futility of merely human means. More than that, it is a story of a God whose fidelity to his promises is the one constant in the midst of all the ways we seek to distance ourselves from Him.

On this climactic night of the Triduum, what we celebrate is of one piece with what has gone before, that is, the vindication of the Cross itself: that suffering has meaning, that the limits of human life teach us and form us, and that our vocation as Christians is to love through it all.