I love studying theology and have always wondered what it would look like to bring hefty theological discussions into more accessible formats. This essay is an experiment in doing that, and as such I would call its theological content a heavily embellished summary of large chunks of Spirit and Trauma by Shelly Rambo. I commend the original text to you! I’m grateful to Dr. Rambo for her already clear, concise, and engaging writing. Errors and elisions are entirely my own.
When I lived in Boston, there were a couple of huge churches whose doors stood open every day—except Holy Saturday. The lights went out on Good Friday, and then the Church lay suspended. I would walk by and shiver at these flung-open welcomes transformed into shut-up tombs. “Jesus is dead,” I would think.
The Bible is almost completely silent about Holy Saturday. The curtain closes on the stunned and scattered disciples, on the devoted but furtive followers who give Jesus a hasty initial burial as the sun is setting. Then the curtain rises 36 hours later on a few women, while it is still dark.
In between, Jesus is dead. Dead of heart-rending betrayal and gruesome torture. The friends and followers who deserted him are now caught between their apparently-falsified belief in him and their own now-demonstrated faithlessness.
Those who stayed at the foot of the cross face demons of their own. You don’t watch a friend’s torture through a whole night and a whole day without dying a little yourself. You never really walk away; you leave something of you there, and the dirt of Golgotha clings to your shoes no matter how far you go.
Holy Saturday is the patron holiday of trauma—of life after something so unimaginable it breaks your universe, when you fall through the cracks and get stuck there, reliving or fleeing that same event over and over again. Suspended.
This week Micah has slept through the night, but I’ve woken up every night for two hours or more—after a full year of night wakeups, suddenly unable to get back to sleep. “I researched this back when our church fell apart. Remember how I stopped sleeping then?” I asked Nate.
Somehow it wasn’t until later that I realized the church’s last service was two weeks before Easter, 2022.
I think my brain and body are still hoping to find the solution and rescue us all.
My country is funding a genocide, and I think here is a time to observe Holy Saturday and not just wait through it. And that is how I come to be nursing a wiggly baby and reading an academic theology text by my former professor called Spirit and Trauma.1
Dr. Shelly Rambo points out (alongside others2) that we must have Holy Saturday be more than the awkward intermission where we change the set dressing. The very existence of Holy Saturday challenges us to make something of the space after death and without life. And when we fail to do so, we betray everyone who lives with trauma, who treads regularly in that space, living—but also not living—after death, in the confusion of a body whose reality has been ruptured, in the revolt of a mind that cannot narrate what’s happened, in the loneliness of being at an egg hunt and feeling the dust of Golgotha, somehow, through the soles of their shoes.
“Sunday’s coming” doesn’t make all that go away. “Sunday’s coming” just sounds like code for “You and your trauma don’t belong.”
Of course it feels neat and tidy to simply travel from death to life. Of course we’re not in a hurry to interpret the silence of the Gospels on Holy Saturday, because that is too near to admitting that each of us has endured the silence of God.
“He died and rose again!” We run it all together into one word, afraid to breathe in the space after death but without resurrection. “Sunday’s coming,” someone always feels bound to say, but sometimes it sounds like a threat. Please contain your story inside the package prearranged for you, and yes, there is a deadline.
People are always doing this to trauma survivors: “At least you’re alive!”
Birth trauma, especially, is this way. You have traveled to the edge of a mysterious place, and there was always a chance you wouldn’t come back. There are no words for what happened, where you went, or the amount of water and blood involved.
But everyone only wants to hear the end of the story. You are supposed to be grateful. You’re supposed to—required to—move on.
Historically the church does have a teaching about what happened on Holy Saturday; it’s even in the Apostle’s Creed. “He descended into hell”—and emptied it. Jesus was too busy to come back from the dead! He was rescuing souls.
But what if he didn’t simply kick down the door, punch a few demons, and fireman-carry everybody outta there?
What if rescue required something else? What if Jesus actually went to hell, and—alongside all the sinners—simply and agonizingly, in desperate isolation from God—he merely endured?3
Sometimes the only way to heal with trauma is to be witnessed. Even though trauma fractures the memories, distorts time, deceives the body; a witness does not have to discern all the facts or even make sense of the story. There is, in the end, no sense to be made. A witness just has to travel alongside, into the confusion and horror, and choose to stay.
On the night he was betrayed, Jesus spoke an epic love poem to his friends. And in it he repeated over and over: remain in me, and I will remain in you. And then Jesus left.
The teacher and preacher, the friend who so loved children, the hope for a renewed nation, the guy who once cursed a fig tree and seriously, what was that all about—brutally tortured, murdered, dead, buried in the ground.
Maybe Jesus was handed over by his friend. Maybe empire dragged him away. Or maybe he chose to go. But in any case, he died and he was gone. And it was inconceivable, and it happened anyway. All he left behind was a gush of water and blood.
Or did something else remain?
Something barely glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, barely felt as the brush of a feather?
When Jesus “handed over his spirit,” could he have handed it to the ones huddled beneath his cross?
Dr. Rambo reminds us that we know a Spirit who hovers over chaos and dark depths. We have had the same sidelong glimpses of a spirit/Spirit at the place where Jesus’s body meets his divinity meets us. Jesus promised a Helper who knows the way of witness.
The Holy Spirit will be fully given to all the believers at Pentecost, but in Rambo’s reading of Easter for Mary and the beloved disciple4, we are invited to see the outline of this gift already making a way: a Helper in the impossible task of remaining.
Here, in the place most of us would rather skip over, is the same presence of God who has always made Her home in the in-between. Here is the breath of God—in and out—keeping time with the one pacing back and forth in the after-death and not-life. The space of survival is sanctified exactly where nothing is okay, nothing is known, nothing is believed. Where Mary and the beloved disciple feel they exist only as tattered remnants, Spirit, too, remains.
Spirit is not here to rush us to redemption. “Being a witness” does not mean that we owe God a resurrection story. We don’t have to make sense of anything or clean up the blood in time to put on our white shoes for service.
Yes, Sunday is coming. And, that first Sunday’s story began while it was yet dark. For Mary and the beloved disciple, it took place against a backdrop of (literally) blinding grief, mind-bending confusion, and gripping fear. It’s not even clear that the sudden appearance of their friend, who immediately sent them away again to tell the others, actually did much to clear any of that up. Trauma doesn’t just vanish. Resurrection has its complications.
We also don’t have to walk away from the tomb with all the answers. We don’t have to have words for what has happened. We don’t have to know if resurrection is really for us, or what that means. But what we might be able to glimpse out of the corner of our eye is that we are witnessed and we are loved exactly in the Saturday space of loss, exactly in our fractured selves, without a happy ending, or any ending at all. This love does not consist in trying to fix us or rewrite our stories; we know love because love remains. Whatever hell we have endured without knowing how deep or how long, Jesus has also been there. Whatever “after” we find ourselves in, Spirit stays.
Yes, Sunday is coming, but some of us know redemption begins before resurrection. While all is still chaos and fear, Spirit is walking impossible paths with us. Redemption gathers us in the remaining.
Come Sunday, resurrection will also be true. But resurrection will not undo all that came before. We will still be living in our afters—and God will, too.
While Jesus was in Hell, God was being broken apart. Not for punishment or payment; not for masochism or child sacrifice; but for love. Because God chose to take pain and death and separation into Godself. Because redemption and resurrection don’t transcend or undo death; they include it. God chose to suffer and to undergo something radically new in God’s own life, so that it could all be transmuted into something that could belong.5
Come Sunday, while trumpets are sounding and victory is declared, let some of us trudge into the garden while it is yet dark. Let us bring our dissociated bodies and our disbelieving hearts; let us bring our silence and our silenced stories. We are the ones who can’t see through our tears, who mistake the Lord for the gardener, who are too afraid to actually go in the tomb, who just want to touch Him and can’t.
Let the emptiness of Saturday ring out as long as it must, because it will always, always be after even when all is known, healed, transformed. There will never be a neat and tidy Sunday without its disruptive Saturday, resisting our attempts to unsay or assimilate it.
There will never be a Sunday when all of us, and all of our fighting/fleeing/frozen bodies, and all of our overlooked stories, do not belong.
From Friday to Saturday to Sunday and beyond—as Dr. Rambo repeats over and over again—love remains.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
I love studying theology and have always wondered what it would look like to bring hefty theological discussions into more accessible formats. This essay is an experiment in doing that, and as such I would call it a heavily embellished paraphrase of large chunks of Spirit and Trauma. I’m grateful to Dr. Rambo for her already clear, concise, and engaging writing. Errors and elisions should be attributed to me.
particularly Hans Urs von Balthasar, Adrienne von Speyr, and Catherine Keller
this is Balthasar and Speyr.
the beloved disciple, who meets angels and discovers Jesus’s empty graveclothes with Peter, goes unnamed in the book of John.
This is my own understanding/interpretation of Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God. It also reflects my own need to carry forward the story into Sunday/Easter, which Rambo does not share and in fact (with perfectly good reason) critiques!
Lyndsey, thank you for this. You have put beautiful prose and meaningful wisdom to the silence we will commemorate and experience once again this year. The idea that Jesus' time in hell—before he brought captives in his train up from the depths—could have included enduring with them is so powerful, and so like the Jesus I want to know more.
As a foster mum to children so impacted by trauma we live in this truth often.your words bring a theological space for that to be OK. As my eldest sobbed through the Good Friday service, so overwhelmed by anger at the sin she endured that she physically collapsed, this is what I can offer her - thank you 😊 xx